If passengers are lying about having contact with Ebola infected people . . . they will just pop a couple of aspirin to bring down their temperature before landing.
If they are showing symptoms, a high temperature will not be the only symptom in evidence most likely. Aspirin is VERY unlikely to cover the symptoms of ebola. Plus taking a blood thinner (aspirin) when infected with a disease that results in bleeding is a monumentally stupid idea.
they're simply desperate to find anything that will stop it.
We already know what we stop the epidemic. Appropriately executed public health policies, particularly quarantine. I understand people's fear and desperation but public health policy is not the place for panic. To use a basketball analogy these people are proposing taking half-court shots and hoping for the best rather than doing the hard work of actually doing what we already know will work. We are NOT going to save everyone but rushing things along is very likely to actually kill more people in the long run.
Even if a treatment gives them cancer, or HIV, or leaves them with something like chronic fatigue syndrome, they're still going to enjoy quality of life better than they would if they're dead.
What hypothetical treatment do you think will have this outcome? Hmm? What treatment? Very few drug candidates actually prove effective and there is no reason to believe that things will be any different this time. I'm well aware there is work being done regarding this disease but please share with the class what treatment we expect to have any actual hope of working because I certainly am not aware of it.
If there's any time to drop stages between reasoned research and application on human patients, this is it. Look at each and every patient as they're treated and attempt to monitor them after-the-fact.
I could not disagree more. First off, this is a small epidemic that has gotten blown WAY out of proportion in the media. Second, there is absolutely no reason to expect any particular experimental drug to work. While it is possible one might work, the odds are very long against it. Third, this approach actually hinders our ability to learn about WHY a drug works if by some miracle it actually does work. Fourth, ebola is not universally fatal. Between 20%-50% of patients survive. Unless the effects of a drug are VERY dramatic, you'll never know if the drug is what saved a patient.
The point of randomised controlled trials is to form a perfect control group for comparison.
More or less correct. You are trying to control for variables between the treated groups and the non-treated groups to see if there is a statistically significant difference in outcomes between them. If there is a better way to do this than a double-blind study, we haven't found it yet. We do use other study designs when a double-blind study isn't possible but other methods have significant problems.
So why not start giving the drug to everyone and compare against historical data?
Several reasons: 1) Which drug? Do we have enough of it? Can we get it to where it is needed? Has it been previously tested in humans for toxicity? Is there any reason to believe it will work beyond mere hope? 2) We do NOT have particularly good information in the historical record. The medical records in the affected areas are quite certain to be of poor quality. So you lose a LOT of information that is relevant for making comparisons and you do not have a particularly good control group. 3) Unless you can control for other variables like public health policies etc you may not know if it worked or how well. 4) Rushing a drug to market can result in losing valuable information about WHY it worked (or didn't) which may be more valuable than IF it worked to future patients 5) Most drugs do not work. Do you REALLY want to spread already scarce resources even thinner on a long shot that probably will not work?
They may do something like what you suggest but I think that would be a mistake. We KNOW how to control this virus through public health policy. Hyperventilating and throwing a bunch of unproven drugs at the problem in the (probably futile) hope that they will do some good is not only bad policy, it is probably counterproductive.
The available ZMapp was wasted in a worthless political demonstration "that something can be done".
Quote so. There were only a few doses available and without a trial of statistically significant size we cannot possible know if this treatment was effective. Ebola is serious but it doesn't kill everyone it infects. So if you give a treatment to a tiny group of people you have absolutely no way to know if the treatment was effective. You have wasted time and money and hope and learned absolutely nothing in the process. It's idiotic.
argue that although randomised controlled trials (RCTs) provide robust evidence in most circumstances, the lack of effective treatment options for Ebola, high mortality with the current standard of care, and the paucity of effective health care systems in the affected regions means that alternative trial designs need to be considered."
Translation: Even though randomized trials are the gold standard for determining whether a treatment is effective or not, these places have shitty health care systems so we think should do something else now that we know is a bad idea even though it will be detrimental in the long run rather than engage in the hard work that will really solve the problem.
Conveniently these "alternative trial designs" are not detailed in any way. Doing something different for the sake of doing something different is rarely a good idea.
We use randomized trials for VERY good reasons. If we push a bunch of experimental treatments out there it's possible we may save some lives but it is more likely we will accomplish nothing and even worse we will learn nothing in the process. Yes some people are going to die from ebola while we develop treatments. This is the cold hard fact of medicine - we sacrifice some so that a greater number may benefit eventually. You can try taking shortcuts but the odds are very long against them working and even worse you run a high risk of sacrificing future patients on the altar of compassion.
I get that people are dying and my heart goes out to them. But we do things the way we do them for very good reasons and the middle of a (minor overblown) crisis is hardly the time to start throwing out what we know for a fact works.
A graphical display is easier to read than a digital readout.
The truth of that statement depends strongly on the nature of what is being communicated. Sometimes a graphic is far more informative. Sometimes a number is more helpful. But the choice of either is context dependent. You can easily find examples where each is preferred in a particular circumstance.
Most cars come with analog readouts for speedometers, temperature and gas tanks.
You may be surprised to find out that many of those are now actually digital. The gauges look all old-timey and appear analog but the actual signal being communicated is a digital signal and thus so are the gauges technically speaking.
Most portable electronics use analog readouts to sow remaining battery power as well as signal strength for WiFi.
Those are digital too. Does not matter at all how it looks.
The volume setting on my laptop and ipod is analog too.
Not it is not. It is digital imitating analog. Not at all the same thing. The volume on those devices increases/decreases in discrete amounts and hence it cannot be analog by definition. No continuous signal = Not analog.
I'll take a good dial caliper over the cheap digital ones I've had.
Why bother with the cheap digital ones? If the measurement is important get a good gauge whether it be digital or analog. What's important is whether it tells you what you want to know for a price that makes sense.
It's receiving digital information, and using that to control a servomotor to position a needle, and looks a lot like old-time all-mechanical meters, but it's still analog in the sense that it's displaying information in an analog fashion, rather than as a numerical readout.
If it is receiving digital information then it is by definition a digital meter. What it physically looks like is irrelevant. That's like saying my iPod is analog because it's playing music in an analog fashion. It's not the same thing. If it isn't working directly with an analog signal it is NOT an analog device regardless of how old-timey it looks.
The first thing is that they are larger, heavier, and more prone to failure than an LCD display, and more difficult to replace as well.
I think you greatly underestimate the reliability of analog gauges. You also may be surprised to find out that they are generally rather easy to replace as well. Not to say digital displays don't have their (ever increasing) place but don't be so eager to throw out analog devices that work exceedingly well at their specific task.
Even Teslas, which have an LCD screen in the dashboard, have analog meters; they're just done in software, no different that a phone or PC that has an icon of an analog clock face.
That's not analog strictly speaking. That is a digital device imitating an analog display. Nothing wrong with that but it isn't the same thing. To be an analog device it has to operate on analog (continuous) signals. Digital devices by definition cannot do more than an approximation of a continuous signal. Possibly a very good approximation but an approximation nonetheless.
Interestingly, though, modern cars with analog meters actually have them driven digitally; the indicator is really a servomotor, driven by digital information over a vehicle bus.
If they are doing that then the meter isn't actually analog. Analog means something rather specific. If you run an analog signal through a A->D converter and then through a D->A converter you do not end up with the exact same signal you started with. It might be very useful to do that but you could accomplish the same end by simply using an analog device in the first place and not bothering with the conversions at all.
The reason analog instruments still prevail is because they can be interpreted easily at a glance
We use analog instruments to interpret analog signals because it is economical and sensible to do it that way. We can display the same information digitally in basically the same format if we desire to but in many cases this adds a lot of cost for little/no added benefit. It is simply often more cost effective to use analog devices to measure analog signals when practical. It's a keep-it-simple sort of philosophy. There is a time and a place for both digital and analog and that line can get pretty blurry sometimes.
In a civil lawsuit, all the filing costs are paid by the plaintiff, not the defendant.
Filing costs maybe but not lawyers fees which always account for the bulk of the cost of any lawsuit aside from any adverse judgements. Filing costs are a rounding error.
If you know you spoke the truth, and you have solid evidence to back that up, then you really don't need a lawyer.
HAHAHAHAHAHA... If you believe that you are an idiot and have never been on the pointy end of an actual lawsuit. This isn't an episode of Judge Judy we are talking about here.
In America, the truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander. As long as you have documented your accusations, you have little to worry about.
Except for perhaps going bankrupt defending yourself. Being right isn't worth much if you get put out of business proving that fact. Accusing a large company with flesh eating lawyers of anything publicly can result in a very costly lawsuit regardless of the merits of the case.
They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
Ummm, how about building a working reactor first. Then we can talk about cost and scaling and other practical considerations. Until they build one that works and puts out more energy than it consumes it is pure science fiction.
So lives in the future are worth less than lives now? I could not disagree more. If we practiced what you suggest we would never do any studies because we would always be putting them off into the future. We use controlled studies because it is the best way to know if something works and just as importantly why it works. And yes this comes at the cost of some lives. We sacrifice some so that more may live in the future. If you can find a better way to do it then let us know and go collect your Nobel prize. Without controlled studies it is nearly impossible to figure out whether a treatment is effective or not.
Rushing a life-saving treatment to deployment is always ethical:
Not true. First off, we DO NOT KNOW if these treatments will work. Even if they do work we will not know why they worked. We might get lucky but odds are we will not. Giving an unproven treatment in the hope that it will work outside of a medical study is compassionate but ultimately self defeating because you learn nothing from it. If defy you to find a medical ethicist who would agree that rushing unproven candidate treatments into use is "always ethical". I assure you that they would say exactly the opposite.
people like to bitch about experimentation on humans and all the complications and side-effects and suffering you can cause, but this doesn't fucking apply when your human guinnea pigs are definitely going to die soon.
Riddle me this. You apply an unproven candidate treatment to a patient dying of ebola without that patient being part of a controlled study. How do you know whether or not the treatment worked? The answer is you don't. You literally have no way to know if the treatment is what saved that specific patient or if some unknown factor saved them. Not everyone who has ebola dies from it. So instead of taking the risk of the patient dying and learning something you have administered a treatment and learned absolutely nothing in the process. You don't know what saved that patient and in the process you have denied future patients the benefits of what could have been learned. THAT my friend is hugely unethical. There are damn good reasons why we do not do things that way.
There are some exceptions we make on occasion for compassionate reasons. We try an unproven treatment as a last ditch effort to save someone certain to die when nothing further can be learned. But patients infected with ebola do not fit that description. Many/most will die but not all. Forgoing the opportunity to learn something from their disease process in favor of quackery is highly unethical.
The only objective is to keep them from dying, and we already know the death rate of ebola through empirical observation, so we don't need a control group.
I disagree strongly with your framing of this issue. The objective is (or should be) to keep the LARGEST POSSIBLE number of people from dying. This means that we have to weigh the needs of the patients who are sick right now against the needs of future patients who will become infected. The demonstrated best way to learn if a treatment is effective, safe and to learn why is through controlled studies. Often this means we sacrifice some so that more may live in the future. While i'm not suggesting we don't do what we can for every patient it would be borderline suicidal to ignore proven best practices to save some now that will result in more deaths down the road.
Without a control group you might learn if a treatment is effective if the effect is sufficiently pronounced but you'll have little idea why. To understand why a treatment works you need to be able to control the variables between groups getting a treatment and those that are not and isolate those things that are different between them. A treatment that saves a patient today is much less valuable than one that saves hundreds tomorrow.
When death is on the line people will do what they need to do to survive, your study be damned.
They'll do what they THINK will help even if there is no evidence to back that up. Just because desperate people are being (understandably) irrational doesn't mean the rest of us should join them. We do things the way we do them because it works and because the alternatives result in much worse problems.
So just give the drug to them all and save your study work for when there isn't an epidemic going on.
There is always an epidemic going on somewhere. The value of these studies is that it saves many at the expense of a few. That is the cold hard fact of medicine. Some people are going to die/suffer so that others can live. Giving someone a treatment before we actually have proof does a disservice to later patients because we cannot learn what works and why. It also is right on the edge of being quackery. The vast majority of candidate treatments turn out to be ineffective or even outright harmful. There are sometimes good reasons to make exceptions to this policy but they are relatively few and far between.
One problem with rushing a treatment to market (aside from the obvious side effects and toxicity risks) is that you sometimes end up with a treatment that works but you have no idea why it works. This has happened with some drugs in the past. We've started testing them and found that they worked really well. So we stopped the clinical trials early in order to rush the drug to market quickly for perfectly appropriate humanitarian reasons. After all if you have a drug that you know works then it's pretty cruel to withhold it from someone who would benefit. The problem is that sometimes we know a drug works before we know why or how it works.
Part of clinical trials is figuring out if a treatment will work. The other part which is sometimes even more important is figuring out why a treatment works so that we can build off that information in the future. If you skip or stop clinical trials early you sometimes end up losing this critical information. If we don't know why something works it's pretty hard to make further progress in developing even better treatments.
What possible benefit is there to taxing fuel, other than to hand more money to the government to waste?
There are two primary benefits:
One is that the amount of fuel used is a reasonable proxy for the amount of driving that is occurring and thus matching tax revenues with road maintenance costs. If you are going to have cars driving on roads then you need a source of tax revenue to pay for said roads. A fuel tax is really the best way to calibrate road use with tax revenues. (Note I said fuel and not gasoline or diesel - I fully expect electricity to be taxed to pay for roads should electric vehicles become a meaningful percentage of the cars on the road)
The other (more indirect) benefit is that by making fuel more expensive it influences purchasing behavior in ways that result in improved fuel economy and reduce pollution. Less fuel burned = money available for other productive uses. Less fuel burned = less particulates and greenhouse gasses. Less fuel burned = less need for the government to tax you.
In "right to work" states, you can fire someone for no reason at all, but even in these states, if you cite a reason, everything changes.
"Right to work" laws govern whether unions can force employees in an organized company to pay dues even if they do not want to be a member of the union. This has nothing directly to do with at will employment which applies to every worker not covered under a contractual agreement (including union contracts) stipulating conditions for termination. At will employment means you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all unless it impacts your status as a protected class.
You'll note I was talking about the stock markets.
Doesn't matter. Same arguments still apply.
Which are operating under the unsupportable, and irrational premise that all companies need to grow every single year, and that it's mathematically unsustainable without new markets.
There's nothing irrational about investors wanting a return on their investment. If I'm going to buy a stake in your company then as an investor I have a reasonable expectation that the company will provide me with a return on my investment proportional to the risk I am taking. Furthermore that return on investment needs to be greater than the alternative investment opportunities available to me. Why would I ever invest in a risky tech startup if the return on my investment is less than that of a much safer government bond?
Nobody (rational) expects "all companies" to grow every year. Some are going to succeed, others are going to go out of business, still others will just continue to exist not doing much. Some companies like power utilities What investors DO expect is that if you want investment in the company that you will have to provide an expected return and that generally requires growth of the company to achieve.
So, the way the stock market operates these days is a giant ponzi scheme which can't possibly be sustained.
Aside from some fancier technology the stock market operates no differently than it ever did.
Because, these days, if you're not growing 5-10% per annum, you must be in decline.
No, you just have to be growing faster than the population grows. While it's a bit more complicated than this, if your economic growth is slower than the rate of increase in the population then you are spreading resources among more people and therefore everyone is on average a little bit worse off. Since there has been no prolonged decrease in human population in recorded history you have to have a few percent of economic growth merely to stay right where you are.
For an economy like the US a growth rate of 2-4% annually is normal. That 3% is $486 billion in GDP growth - that means to grow at 3% the US has to create the 23rd largest economy in the world EVERY YEAR. Larger than the entire economy of Norway.
People make a big deal out of China's Growth rate (around 8%) but in total dollar amounts China's growth isn't much higher than the US at $668 billion. As China's economy gets larger it will necessarily slow its growth rate. The only reason they've been able to keep such a high growth rate is that their per-capita GDP was quite low until recently.
I would not want to own a parts supplier in these times.
It's ok to be a parts supplier but you may not want to be a Tier 1 parts supplier to a large company. When you do that much business with a single enormous company you are pretty much their bitch and there isn't much you can do about it. The product volume when dealing directly with big companies is hard to resist but can bankrupt you if you aren't careful.
One of the big problems you didn't note about dealing with big automotive companies is that they seem to have never heard of the bullwhip effect. My company supplies GM (we're tier 3) and they are CONSTANTLY screwing around with their demand forecasts. We have a part that we supply to them that has a 4 month lead time (picked over alterntives with no lead time by some dumb ass engineer) and I assure you we do not get 4 months of schedule visibility. So we have to place big orders and hope we don't get whipsawed by changes in demand 3 months later.
f you're applying for a programming job, that will never come into contact with customers, why the hell should you need to demonstrate an ability to sell stuff?
To get a job you need to be able to sell someone on the notion that you are a good fit for the job. Sales doesn't just mean being a professional sales person trying to sell a product. The product each and every one of us has to sell is our abilities. If you want a job you have a sales pitch to make. Whether you are comfortable with that or not is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
If passengers are lying about having contact with Ebola infected people . . . they will just pop a couple of aspirin to bring down their temperature before landing.
If they are showing symptoms, a high temperature will not be the only symptom in evidence most likely. Aspirin is VERY unlikely to cover the symptoms of ebola. Plus taking a blood thinner (aspirin) when infected with a disease that results in bleeding is a monumentally stupid idea.
they're simply desperate to find anything that will stop it.
We already know what we stop the epidemic. Appropriately executed public health policies, particularly quarantine. I understand people's fear and desperation but public health policy is not the place for panic. To use a basketball analogy these people are proposing taking half-court shots and hoping for the best rather than doing the hard work of actually doing what we already know will work. We are NOT going to save everyone but rushing things along is very likely to actually kill more people in the long run.
Even if a treatment gives them cancer, or HIV, or leaves them with something like chronic fatigue syndrome, they're still going to enjoy quality of life better than they would if they're dead.
What hypothetical treatment do you think will have this outcome? Hmm? What treatment? Very few drug candidates actually prove effective and there is no reason to believe that things will be any different this time. I'm well aware there is work being done regarding this disease but please share with the class what treatment we expect to have any actual hope of working because I certainly am not aware of it.
If there's any time to drop stages between reasoned research and application on human patients, this is it. Look at each and every patient as they're treated and attempt to monitor them after-the-fact.
I could not disagree more. First off, this is a small epidemic that has gotten blown WAY out of proportion in the media. Second, there is absolutely no reason to expect any particular experimental drug to work. While it is possible one might work, the odds are very long against it. Third, this approach actually hinders our ability to learn about WHY a drug works if by some miracle it actually does work. Fourth, ebola is not universally fatal. Between 20%-50% of patients survive. Unless the effects of a drug are VERY dramatic, you'll never know if the drug is what saved a patient.
The point of randomised controlled trials is to form a perfect control group for comparison.
More or less correct. You are trying to control for variables between the treated groups and the non-treated groups to see if there is a statistically significant difference in outcomes between them. If there is a better way to do this than a double-blind study, we haven't found it yet. We do use other study designs when a double-blind study isn't possible but other methods have significant problems.
So why not start giving the drug to everyone and compare against historical data?
Several reasons:
1) Which drug? Do we have enough of it? Can we get it to where it is needed? Has it been previously tested in humans for toxicity? Is there any reason to believe it will work beyond mere hope?
2) We do NOT have particularly good information in the historical record. The medical records in the affected areas are quite certain to be of poor quality. So you lose a LOT of information that is relevant for making comparisons and you do not have a particularly good control group.
3) Unless you can control for other variables like public health policies etc you may not know if it worked or how well.
4) Rushing a drug to market can result in losing valuable information about WHY it worked (or didn't) which may be more valuable than IF it worked to future patients
5) Most drugs do not work. Do you REALLY want to spread already scarce resources even thinner on a long shot that probably will not work?
They may do something like what you suggest but I think that would be a mistake. We KNOW how to control this virus through public health policy. Hyperventilating and throwing a bunch of unproven drugs at the problem in the (probably futile) hope that they will do some good is not only bad policy, it is probably counterproductive.
The available ZMapp was wasted in a worthless political demonstration "that something can be done".
Quote so. There were only a few doses available and without a trial of statistically significant size we cannot possible know if this treatment was effective. Ebola is serious but it doesn't kill everyone it infects. So if you give a treatment to a tiny group of people you have absolutely no way to know if the treatment was effective. You have wasted time and money and hope and learned absolutely nothing in the process. It's idiotic.
argue that although randomised controlled trials (RCTs) provide robust evidence in most circumstances, the lack of effective treatment options for Ebola, high mortality with the current standard of care, and the paucity of effective health care systems in the affected regions means that alternative trial designs need to be considered."
Translation:
Even though randomized trials are the gold standard for determining whether a treatment is effective or not, these places have shitty health care systems so we think should do something else now that we know is a bad idea even though it will be detrimental in the long run rather than engage in the hard work that will really solve the problem.
Conveniently these "alternative trial designs" are not detailed in any way. Doing something different for the sake of doing something different is rarely a good idea.
We use randomized trials for VERY good reasons. If we push a bunch of experimental treatments out there it's possible we may save some lives but it is more likely we will accomplish nothing and even worse we will learn nothing in the process. Yes some people are going to die from ebola while we develop treatments. This is the cold hard fact of medicine - we sacrifice some so that a greater number may benefit eventually. You can try taking shortcuts but the odds are very long against them working and even worse you run a high risk of sacrificing future patients on the altar of compassion.
I get that people are dying and my heart goes out to them. But we do things the way we do them for very good reasons and the middle of a (minor overblown) crisis is hardly the time to start throwing out what we know for a fact works.
A graphical display is easier to read than a digital readout.
The truth of that statement depends strongly on the nature of what is being communicated. Sometimes a graphic is far more informative. Sometimes a number is more helpful. But the choice of either is context dependent. You can easily find examples where each is preferred in a particular circumstance.
Most cars come with analog readouts for speedometers, temperature and gas tanks.
You may be surprised to find out that many of those are now actually digital. The gauges look all old-timey and appear analog but the actual signal being communicated is a digital signal and thus so are the gauges technically speaking.
Most portable electronics use analog readouts to sow remaining battery power as well as signal strength for WiFi.
Those are digital too. Does not matter at all how it looks.
The volume setting on my laptop and ipod is analog too.
Not it is not. It is digital imitating analog. Not at all the same thing. The volume on those devices increases/decreases in discrete amounts and hence it cannot be analog by definition. No continuous signal = Not analog.
I'll take a good dial caliper over the cheap digital ones I've had.
Why bother with the cheap digital ones? If the measurement is important get a good gauge whether it be digital or analog. What's important is whether it tells you what you want to know for a price that makes sense.
It's receiving digital information, and using that to control a servomotor to position a needle, and looks a lot like old-time all-mechanical meters, but it's still analog in the sense that it's displaying information in an analog fashion, rather than as a numerical readout.
If it is receiving digital information then it is by definition a digital meter. What it physically looks like is irrelevant. That's like saying my iPod is analog because it's playing music in an analog fashion. It's not the same thing. If it isn't working directly with an analog signal it is NOT an analog device regardless of how old-timey it looks.
The first thing is that they are larger, heavier, and more prone to failure than an LCD display, and more difficult to replace as well.
I think you greatly underestimate the reliability of analog gauges. You also may be surprised to find out that they are generally rather easy to replace as well. Not to say digital displays don't have their (ever increasing) place but don't be so eager to throw out analog devices that work exceedingly well at their specific task.
Even Teslas, which have an LCD screen in the dashboard, have analog meters; they're just done in software, no different that a phone or PC that has an icon of an analog clock face.
That's not analog strictly speaking. That is a digital device imitating an analog display. Nothing wrong with that but it isn't the same thing. To be an analog device it has to operate on analog (continuous) signals. Digital devices by definition cannot do more than an approximation of a continuous signal. Possibly a very good approximation but an approximation nonetheless.
Interestingly, though, modern cars with analog meters actually have them driven digitally; the indicator is really a servomotor, driven by digital information over a vehicle bus.
If they are doing that then the meter isn't actually analog. Analog means something rather specific. If you run an analog signal through a A->D converter and then through a D->A converter you do not end up with the exact same signal you started with. It might be very useful to do that but you could accomplish the same end by simply using an analog device in the first place and not bothering with the conversions at all.
The reason analog instruments still prevail is because they can be interpreted easily at a glance
We use analog instruments to interpret analog signals because it is economical and sensible to do it that way. We can display the same information digitally in basically the same format if we desire to but in many cases this adds a lot of cost for little/no added benefit. It is simply often more cost effective to use analog devices to measure analog signals when practical. It's a keep-it-simple sort of philosophy. There is a time and a place for both digital and analog and that line can get pretty blurry sometimes.
In a civil lawsuit, all the filing costs are paid by the plaintiff, not the defendant.
Filing costs maybe but not lawyers fees which always account for the bulk of the cost of any lawsuit aside from any adverse judgements. Filing costs are a rounding error.
If you know you spoke the truth, and you have solid evidence to back that up, then you really don't need a lawyer.
HAHAHAHAHAHA... If you believe that you are an idiot and have never been on the pointy end of an actual lawsuit. This isn't an episode of Judge Judy we are talking about here.
In America, the truth is an absolute defense against libel/slander. As long as you have documented your accusations, you have little to worry about.
Except for perhaps going bankrupt defending yourself. Being right isn't worth much if you get put out of business proving that fact. Accusing a large company with flesh eating lawyers of anything publicly can result in a very costly lawsuit regardless of the merits of the case.
They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.
Ummm, how about building a working reactor first. Then we can talk about cost and scaling and other practical considerations. Until they build one that works and puts out more energy than it consumes it is pure science fiction.
You can always do that research in the future.
So lives in the future are worth less than lives now? I could not disagree more. If we practiced what you suggest we would never do any studies because we would always be putting them off into the future. We use controlled studies because it is the best way to know if something works and just as importantly why it works. And yes this comes at the cost of some lives. We sacrifice some so that more may live in the future. If you can find a better way to do it then let us know and go collect your Nobel prize. Without controlled studies it is nearly impossible to figure out whether a treatment is effective or not.
Rushing a life-saving treatment to deployment is always ethical:
Not true. First off, we DO NOT KNOW if these treatments will work. Even if they do work we will not know why they worked. We might get lucky but odds are we will not. Giving an unproven treatment in the hope that it will work outside of a medical study is compassionate but ultimately self defeating because you learn nothing from it. If defy you to find a medical ethicist who would agree that rushing unproven candidate treatments into use is "always ethical". I assure you that they would say exactly the opposite.
people like to bitch about experimentation on humans and all the complications and side-effects and suffering you can cause, but this doesn't fucking apply when your human guinnea pigs are definitely going to die soon.
Riddle me this. You apply an unproven candidate treatment to a patient dying of ebola without that patient being part of a controlled study. How do you know whether or not the treatment worked? The answer is you don't. You literally have no way to know if the treatment is what saved that specific patient or if some unknown factor saved them. Not everyone who has ebola dies from it. So instead of taking the risk of the patient dying and learning something you have administered a treatment and learned absolutely nothing in the process. You don't know what saved that patient and in the process you have denied future patients the benefits of what could have been learned. THAT my friend is hugely unethical. There are damn good reasons why we do not do things that way.
There are some exceptions we make on occasion for compassionate reasons. We try an unproven treatment as a last ditch effort to save someone certain to die when nothing further can be learned. But patients infected with ebola do not fit that description. Many/most will die but not all. Forgoing the opportunity to learn something from their disease process in favor of quackery is highly unethical.
The only objective is to keep them from dying, and we already know the death rate of ebola through empirical observation, so we don't need a control group.
I disagree strongly with your framing of this issue. The objective is (or should be) to keep the LARGEST POSSIBLE number of people from dying. This means that we have to weigh the needs of the patients who are sick right now against the needs of future patients who will become infected. The demonstrated best way to learn if a treatment is effective, safe and to learn why is through controlled studies. Often this means we sacrifice some so that more may live in the future. While i'm not suggesting we don't do what we can for every patient it would be borderline suicidal to ignore proven best practices to save some now that will result in more deaths down the road.
Without a control group you might learn if a treatment is effective if the effect is sufficiently pronounced but you'll have little idea why. To understand why a treatment works you need to be able to control the variables between groups getting a treatment and those that are not and isolate those things that are different between them. A treatment that saves a patient today is much less valuable than one that saves hundreds tomorrow.
When death is on the line people will do what they need to do to survive, your study be damned.
They'll do what they THINK will help even if there is no evidence to back that up. Just because desperate people are being (understandably) irrational doesn't mean the rest of us should join them. We do things the way we do them because it works and because the alternatives result in much worse problems.
So just give the drug to them all and save your study work for when there isn't an epidemic going on.
There is always an epidemic going on somewhere. The value of these studies is that it saves many at the expense of a few. That is the cold hard fact of medicine. Some people are going to die/suffer so that others can live. Giving someone a treatment before we actually have proof does a disservice to later patients because we cannot learn what works and why. It also is right on the edge of being quackery. The vast majority of candidate treatments turn out to be ineffective or even outright harmful. There are sometimes good reasons to make exceptions to this policy but they are relatively few and far between.
One problem with rushing a treatment to market (aside from the obvious side effects and toxicity risks) is that you sometimes end up with a treatment that works but you have no idea why it works. This has happened with some drugs in the past. We've started testing them and found that they worked really well. So we stopped the clinical trials early in order to rush the drug to market quickly for perfectly appropriate humanitarian reasons. After all if you have a drug that you know works then it's pretty cruel to withhold it from someone who would benefit. The problem is that sometimes we know a drug works before we know why or how it works.
Part of clinical trials is figuring out if a treatment will work. The other part which is sometimes even more important is figuring out why a treatment works so that we can build off that information in the future. If you skip or stop clinical trials early you sometimes end up losing this critical information. If we don't know why something works it's pretty hard to make further progress in developing even better treatments.
What possible benefit is there to taxing fuel, other than to hand more money to the government to waste?
There are two primary benefits:
One is that the amount of fuel used is a reasonable proxy for the amount of driving that is occurring and thus matching tax revenues with road maintenance costs. If you are going to have cars driving on roads then you need a source of tax revenue to pay for said roads. A fuel tax is really the best way to calibrate road use with tax revenues. (Note I said fuel and not gasoline or diesel - I fully expect electricity to be taxed to pay for roads should electric vehicles become a meaningful percentage of the cars on the road)
The other (more indirect) benefit is that by making fuel more expensive it influences purchasing behavior in ways that result in improved fuel economy and reduce pollution. Less fuel burned = money available for other productive uses. Less fuel burned = less particulates and greenhouse gasses. Less fuel burned = less need for the government to tax you.
In "right to work" states, you can fire someone for no reason at all, but even in these states, if you cite a reason, everything changes.
"Right to work" laws govern whether unions can force employees in an organized company to pay dues even if they do not want to be a member of the union. This has nothing directly to do with at will employment which applies to every worker not covered under a contractual agreement (including union contracts) stipulating conditions for termination. At will employment means you can be fired for any reason or no reason at all unless it impacts your status as a protected class.
You'll note I was talking about the stock markets.
Doesn't matter. Same arguments still apply.
Which are operating under the unsupportable, and irrational premise that all companies need to grow every single year, and that it's mathematically unsustainable without new markets.
There's nothing irrational about investors wanting a return on their investment. If I'm going to buy a stake in your company then as an investor I have a reasonable expectation that the company will provide me with a return on my investment proportional to the risk I am taking. Furthermore that return on investment needs to be greater than the alternative investment opportunities available to me. Why would I ever invest in a risky tech startup if the return on my investment is less than that of a much safer government bond?
Nobody (rational) expects "all companies" to grow every year. Some are going to succeed, others are going to go out of business, still others will just continue to exist not doing much. Some companies like power utilities What investors DO expect is that if you want investment in the company that you will have to provide an expected return and that generally requires growth of the company to achieve.
So, the way the stock market operates these days is a giant ponzi scheme which can't possibly be sustained.
Aside from some fancier technology the stock market operates no differently than it ever did.
Because, these days, if you're not growing 5-10% per annum, you must be in decline.
No, you just have to be growing faster than the population grows. While it's a bit more complicated than this, if your economic growth is slower than the rate of increase in the population then you are spreading resources among more people and therefore everyone is on average a little bit worse off. Since there has been no prolonged decrease in human population in recorded history you have to have a few percent of economic growth merely to stay right where you are.
For an economy like the US a growth rate of 2-4% annually is normal. That 3% is $486 billion in GDP growth - that means to grow at 3% the US has to create the 23rd largest economy in the world EVERY YEAR. Larger than the entire economy of Norway.
People make a big deal out of China's Growth rate (around 8%) but in total dollar amounts China's growth isn't much higher than the US at $668 billion. As China's economy gets larger it will necessarily slow its growth rate. The only reason they've been able to keep such a high growth rate is that their per-capita GDP was quite low until recently.
Wrestling
I would not want to own a parts supplier in these times.
It's ok to be a parts supplier but you may not want to be a Tier 1 parts supplier to a large company. When you do that much business with a single enormous company you are pretty much their bitch and there isn't much you can do about it. The product volume when dealing directly with big companies is hard to resist but can bankrupt you if you aren't careful.
One of the big problems you didn't note about dealing with big automotive companies is that they seem to have never heard of the bullwhip effect. My company supplies GM (we're tier 3) and they are CONSTANTLY screwing around with their demand forecasts. We have a part that we supply to them that has a 4 month lead time (picked over alterntives with no lead time by some dumb ass engineer) and I assure you we do not get 4 months of schedule visibility. So we have to place big orders and hope we don't get whipsawed by changes in demand 3 months later.
f you're applying for a programming job, that will never come into contact with customers, why the hell should you need to demonstrate an ability to sell stuff?
To get a job you need to be able to sell someone on the notion that you are a good fit for the job. Sales doesn't just mean being a professional sales person trying to sell a product. The product each and every one of us has to sell is our abilities. If you want a job you have a sales pitch to make. Whether you are comfortable with that or not is irrelevant.