From your lack of knowledge about the history of science and bigotry and ignorance about religion...
Since I have provided very little evidence regarding the depth (or lack) of my knowledge you are not in a position to evaluate. I do however seem to be making you quite uncomfortable. Your ad-hominem attack leads me to believe you do not have anything substantial to add to the conversation. In short, either prove me wrong with facts or bugger off.
So something is only science if it follows the scientific method?
Yes. By definition that is correct.
We can ignore that science did not always means scientific method or that the scientific method didn't even come about until some time in the 17th century.
The scientific method is much older than you apparently believe. While the modern approach didn't fully develop until roughly the 17th century, it was in use much much earlier than that. Being conscious of the fact you are using the scientific method is not a requirement of the method. Science has been conducted for a long time. However invoking supernatural beings violates the requirement for observable evidence and therefore cannot be science by definition.
The very earliest religions *were* attempts at science (granted, not very good ones by today's standards, but nevertheless they followed the idea of observing natural phenomenon and attempted to produce explanations for them).
This is incorrect. Just because it is an attempt at an explanation does not make it science. The scientific method requires empirical and measurable evidence to support a theory. Any invocation of a supernatural being immediately violates both of these requirements and therefore is not science.
The fact is most people who badmouth religion and it's connection to science know very little about religion itself.
It is actually quite easy to find people who are rather knowledgeable about both. And frankly one does not have to dig very deep into religion to find the deep logical problems with the stories its practitioners represent as truth.
It became broken when FDR fucked the constitution and started transfer payments.
Ummm, sure... whatever. I'll just nod my head and pretend that makes any sense at all even though it doesn't.
Now that a majority of voters don't pay significant taxes we are permanently fucked.
Where did you get a ridiculous notion like that? Your name isn't Mitt Romney by an chance is it? Most people pay quite a lot of taxes. Not enough to cover Social Security, Defense and Medicare but they pay about 2-3 Trillion per year to the federal government alone. Most pay some combination of Federal Income tax, FICA (Social security + Medicare), State income tax, property tax, vehicle registration, gas tax, and quite a few more.
The Ds think they don't have a spending problem. The Rs think only the Ds have a spending problem.
It's not solely a problem with either the Ds or the Rs really. It's a problem with the voters who elect them. Their disagreements usually are just a symptom of the problem. WE are the ones who demand all these services (medicare, defense, etc) but WE are the ones who vote people out of office who dare to suggest it will cost something and that we might have to pay taxes for them. WE are the the ones who refuse to acknowledge that we might not actually need 11 aircraft carrier battle groups or perhaps we might be ok with a bit less Medicare. Our leaders are to an alarming degree a reflection of our own dysfunction. It's easy to blame them but collectively if we want to point fingers the mirror is a good place to start.
Part of my frustration with the situation, is that there is very little true culpability for non-obvious mistakes. When I say 'non-obvious' I'm not talking about mistakes which are easy to make, but consequences which are not easily traced back to actual blatant mistakes.
Here's a little secret. You don't actually want every mistake to be easily found and punished. Really, you don't. Even ignoring for a moment that humans are imperfect and that we all make mistakes sometimes. Here's the reason why. The ONLY way to learn medicine is to practice it on real, live humans. Aspiring doctors are very smart and study hard but you cannot really learn medicine until you do it on actual people. Like every other activity, when you are learning it you will make a lot of mistakes. Most if not all doctors have probably unintentionally killed and certainly hurt someone with one of their mistakes. All of them. Wrong diagnosis, wrong prescription, wrong or incorrectly performed procedure, etc. Why do we allow all these mistakes? Because on the whole they get far more right than wrong and medicine is unambiguously beneficial to society.
Doctors are often working with incomplete and/or misleading information. A lot of "mistakes" are only revealed as such after the fact even for the most experienced of doctors. If doctors were punished for every mistake they make, it would be impossible to practice medicine. The risk would simply be too high. Naturally there needs to be standards (high ones) and there is no excuse for not putting forth every effort to achieve the appropriate standard of care. But you can take it too far and punish errors so much that we hurt our ability to treat patients. Let me give you an example. In at least one state I'm aware of, OB/GYNs are potentially liable for any illness a child develops until the time they are 18 years old, including for things that there is no demonstrable connection possible between the actions of the doctor and the patient's outcome. As a result, lots of doctors have gotten out of the specialty because the cost and personal risk has become too high.
I'm married to a doctor. She's the most diligent and conscientiousness person I know and she's damn good at her job. But she would be the first to tell you that she isn't perfect and even if she was perfect and made the best possible call on every patient she STILL would get a significant number of diagnosis wrong because we simply do not know enough about the human body and we do not have perfect information.
Bear in mind as well that every doctor is, at best, delaying the inevitable. You WILL die sooner or later. All a doctor can do is maybe delay it a while and hopefully make you a bit more comfortable along the way. Be demanding of your doctor (they can handle it) but also be a little forgiving as well. They really are trying to help you.
I'm very pleased to hear that. Thanks for sharing your story.
Reading through your story it really isn't so much a problem with a single individual (though that was a part of it) but rather that the communication processes used at that medical facility were insufficiently robust. The nurses and support staff simply aren't going to know about an adverse reaction unless special measures are taken to communicate that information. Even if it is in the chart that isn't always enough. Using the allergy flag was an excellent idea since it accomplishes the correct result and its something the staff is used to dealing with.
FYI, I'm married to a doctor and I've worked doing process improvement in a hospital. Most people there genuinely want to do a good job but sometimes the design of their work processes is lacking. Medicine is a complicated affair and it's sometimes shockingly easy for important information to not be adequately communicated.
Both sides are not equally wrong, but that doesn't mean both sides are right. The Republicans are wrong 99% of the time. The Democrats are wrong 95% of the time. Why can't we field a candidate who's right even half the time?
Because "right" is for better or worse often a matter of opinion. There is no single objectively right answer for many questions. Think abortion or gun control. Lots of opinions on both sides but there is never going to be a single "right" answer. At best there might be a consensus but probably never a unanimous one. Even for questions where a single objectively right answer may theoretically exist, there often is insufficient data to figure out what that answer is. (for example what is the optimal tax rate)
Deadlocking them produces the best feasible outcome.
Except on the periodic occasion when we need them to do actually something. You know, like not endlessly raise the national debt because they want to promise everything but don't want to have to tell the voters they have to actually pay for it someday.
Of course in the US the car is king, but the UK Highways code suggests that you :
Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we're all aware of driving defensively and at a speed safe for the conditions. Utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It is demonstrably safe to drive at high speeds under a wide variety of circumstances. If you are not a drive capable of handling perfectly normal driving speeds like 50+mph then you should not be on the road at all. I've been driving about 25000 miles per year for the last 20 years (that's about a half million miles driven). Much of that has been at speeds as high as 80mph without an accident or other serious incident. While driving is not without some risk, it is a relatively safe activity on well designed and marked roads. That said, I not you did not bother to address the question posed, namely how does one stop in 20 yards from any speed?
The simple fact is that you CANNOT physically stop in 20 yards at any speed higher than about 35-40 miles per hour no matter what you are driving. 2000+ pounds of metal cannot stop that fast on two square feet of rubber. Cannot be done. That does not however mean that it is unsafe to drive at higher speeds.
I think that pretty much covers everyone who is complaining about amber lights, indeed if a traffic light is green, there is only one way the light is going to go - and it's not to blue.
A stupid argument. The ENTIRE point of the yellow light is to give drivers sufficient time to decelerate to a stop before it turns red. If the yellow light is on for too short a time to stop given the speed limit, then you adjust the length of the yellow light. You do not ask every driver to drive considerably slower than the speed limit just in case the light might suddenly change.
There's an argument to be made that fine revenue should be used to defray the costs of parking and traffic enforcement.
I already pay taxes to do that. I have a HUGE problem with the idea of government depending on people breaking laws to fund their operations. It is essentially an indirect form of graft.
I wonder if the judge stopped to think that this is no different than without the cameras. Tickets are a major revenue source for police departments, to the extent that it is not uncommon to hear of stations which have ticket quotas.
There are some very important differences. First is that the accuser in this case is a human who I have a right to face in court should I feel the need. I cannot do that with a camera and a faceless management company. Second, the police officer can make allowances for a situation outside of normal parameters. Sometimes weird things happen. Third, the effectiveness of speed cameras as a safety measure is very much in doubt. Their effectiveness as a revenue generation tool is not in any doubt. Speed cameras are almost always used primarily as a revenue source and have no other purpose than to fine speeders. If no one speeds then they make no economic sense. Police officers have numerous other functions and make sense whether or not people speed.
Finally, and probably most important, I have a HUGE problem with governments depending on people breaking the law as a means of funding regardless of the means used. Any revenue gathered from fining speeders should not be accessible to fund government operations. There should be NO direct financial incentive for governments to benefit from people breaking the law. If it is about safety then it should only be about safety and revenue should not need to play into it.
On general principle, if we could trust authorities, red light cameras are a really good idea.
Our government is premised on the idea that our trust in authorities should be strongly limited. That is why we require warrants, have separation of powers, etc. And I disagree that they are a really good idea. They demonstrably cause more of certain types of accidents (rear end collisions), it is very unclear that they improve public safety, and their primary purpose is to raise revenue for local governments.
Car speedometers are accurate enough these days that there is no need for any tolerance.
They demonstrably are not that accurate. Your speedometer can vary by up to 2% simply due to tire pressure and tread depth variations. Most are fairly close but if the difference between getting a ticket or not is whether I was 3kph or 4kph over the limit then they are not accurate enough to be certain.
Generally speaking speedometers are accurate to +/-10%. In the US they can have a variation of +/- 5mph at 50mph. This means that at 60mph you could be as much as 3mph high or low. Factors such as tread depth, tire pressure and other variations cannot be controlled by the manufacturer and can cause a variation of 1-2% easily. Interestingly lower priced cars tend to have more accurate speedometers than higher priced cars and speedometers are usually wrong by a bit over 1mph. By international agreement the indicated speed should never be lower than the actual speed. This makes sense since going slower than you think you are is generally a safer situation for most people most times.
If people are not paying attention and speeding through the city just to get somewhere else, fuck 'em, write 'em tickets so they learn to slow down or find a different route.
These speed cameras are there to gather revenue, not slow down traffic. The city has a conflict of interest built in. If they really want to control the speed of traffic there are many more effective means of doing so. Police presence, speed bumps, road design, stop signs, etc. Speed cameras are just a cash grab. Furthermore there is no opportunity to face your accuser, the speed camera cannot make allowances for unusual conditions or circumstances and frankly speed limits are not really supposed to be hard upper limits and NEVER have been treated that way by societal convention or enforcement.
Perhaps I am jaded by all the people speeding down my street rushing to the highway on ramps. 35MPH and not many are doing it.
Then either lobby your governement for additional speed control measures or change the speed limit to something more reasonable. If everyone is ignoring the speed limit, there is a strong chance that it is set unreasonably low. Happens all the time, sometimes on purpose. There is a road near our local airport that has a 45 mph speed limit and by all reasonable measures it should be 55 or 60mph at that location. Instead the town uses it as a well known speed trap and collects a lot of revenue. I've also seen roads that had their speed limit set by local statute but where the actual reasonable speed was somewhat different. There is a road on my way to work where the speed limit is 50mph but unless you are in a high performance car on a dry day, good luck going that fast and remaining on the road in the turns. Conversely I've seen plenty of roads where the speed limit was set to 35 or 45 mph but should have been 5-10mph higher.
I've taken to tossing gravel at them as they race by while waiting to put my kindergartener on her school bus.
Then you are an asshole. You think you have the right to damage property just because you dislike how someone else is behaving? I think the phrase about people in glass houses not throwing stones is particularly apt in this case. If I saw you doing that I'd call the police on you and probably try to get you doing it on film.
If you're driving so fast towards a traffic light that you can't stop in twenty yards without screeching the tires, you're doing it wrong, yes.
Really? The road in front of my house has a speed limit of 50mph. Explain to me how I can stop from the posted speed limit of 50mph in my truck within anything close to twenty yards. Even a Corvette ZR1 with huge brakes and tires can only do 60-0 in about 31 yards. For a lot of driving conditions and situations what you are suggesting is physically impossible. And no, driving like my grandmother is not a reasonable solution.
However, most of the expenses are fixed. The publisher spends money up front to produce a nice ebook, and then has a nice ebook that can be sold indefinitely at trivial additional expense.
It is trivial expense to produce but not trivial expense to sell. The model is very similar to software companies. Only about 10% of a software company's expenses are in engineering. The vast majority of the cost is in sales, marketing and overhead. Production of an ebook is similar to production of software - up front fixed costs that are recouped over time. Most of the costs to digital publishers are not in editing or production (their version of engineering). Most of their costs like software companies are also in sales, marketing and overhead which are pretty much the same whether the book is digital or paper. Even digital books do not sell themselves. You still have quite a lot of cost trying to convince people to buy the book.
Once the publisher has recouped original expenses, each additional copy sold is (except for royalties) almost pure profit.
I'm afraid that isn't actually true. The margins should be better for digital versus paper books but it isn't even close to pure proft. Plus you still have something of a distribution monopoly with Amazon and a few others if you want more than 5 people to read your book. You should expect the margins to be similar to a software company, Gross margins between 50-80% and net margins somewhere between 10-25% though depending on how they are distributed the numbers can be lower.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant and one of my clients is a publisher of books. I've dealt with this stuff professionally first hand.
how do you figure they stand to lose more revenue? for one, no overhead (or much less) to host a few meg/gig file than to have a warehouse of 1 million books.
Revenue is not the same thing as Profit. Revenue is how much you sell, Profit is how much you keep. Profit = (Revenue - Expenses). Just because Expenses are lower with digital media doesn't mean a thing by itself. Most of the costs for this sort of media are fixed so Revenue can drop without Expenses falling. If Revenue falls far enough then the company will lose money. It is logical that their revenue might fall but it doesn't automatically follow that they will become unprofitable.
Of course the whole notion of a digital items aftermarket is a bit peculiar...
So you will have to forgive me for not trusting 10+ years of experience vs google when the asshole kept giving tylenol to a guy with liver disease.
It's appropriate to check on what is being prescribed and be involved in your care when you have the ability. Even well intentioned doctors (and pharmacists) make mistakes. Odds are that there was a problem with communication and that it was an honest mistake. Doctor's that would intentionally or negligently harm a patient are quite rare.
That said, if you felt the patient was being intentionally mis-treated or incompetently treated then one has to ask why you continued to let this doctor treat the patient? If this guy was such an "asshole" then you can and should demand a different doctor be involved. You always have that right and you should exercise it if needed. What you are describing is grounds for a lawsuit. Did you bring one or are you just trying to bash doctors in general based on one anecdote?
if a doctor comes across someone who genuinely has a rare condition they're almost certain to misdiagnose it.
And a patient is even more likely to do so. A doctor is supposed to look to the highest probability diagnosis first. Rare diagnosis are hard and it's pretty rare for doctors to have perfect information. Almost every diagnosis is an educated guess and some percentage WILL be wrong. In fact sometimes getting a percentage wrong is considered appropriate care. Doctors are expected to take out a small percentage of appendixes that are not actually wrong. There is no way to know with 100% certainty whether it needs to come out until they actually do the operation and some symptoms can be mimicked by other conditions.
doctors are often too sure they have a deeper understanding than they really do.
This does happen but having a doctor that not confident is rather useless. It's a fine line to tread and most do it reasonably well.
Seems like nothing more than an arse-covering exercise and - if that's so - why do you have to cover your arse?
The same reason the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument is a fallacy. Doctors are sued all the time for various reasons, most of them rather frivolous but expensive and time consuming nonetheless. It isn't hard to twist medical records against you even if there is nothing actually improper contained within them.
If doctors think they are vulnerable to malpractice suits then clearly they are aware that their house needs to be cleaned.
It has nothing to do with how competently they practice or how high their professional standards are. The practice of medicine is an imperfect practice. We do not know everything about the human body and even with the best available medicine and exceeding standard of care doctors are going to be wrong a significant percentage of time and patients are going to sometimes have bad outcomes. All a doctor can do is provide the appropriate standard of care when treating a patient. We should not expect less than standard of care but more cannot reasonably be expected of them.
I'm not arguing for or against patient access to medical records but there are several problems with patients having free access to their medical records. First, most patients do not actually understand a great deal of the information contained in the medical records and often will not react appropriately. It is common for people to think 5 minutes on google somehow will provide more insight than 20 years of medical training and practice. Second, it is very easy for a lawyer to twist the story told by even very meticulous records that meet standard of care into a story indicating that the doctor was somehow negligent even when that is not actually the case.
Of course doctors don't want their misdeeds and incompetence on display for all to see.
Ok, how comfortable are you with detailed records of your workplace performance being handed to the public? If you say it's fine I'll call you a liar. Are your professional standards as high as those required of doctors? (for the record I'm rather confident that they are not) It's easy to throw stones. Doctors are held to very high standards and rightly so. It's unfortunate that the same is not required of everyone else.
I guess doctors make wrong or let's say suboptimal decisions all the time, it's just that rarely people get so bad or die because of it so you actually get into malpraxis discussions.
Doctors do make mistakes just like any human. The human body is a complicated thing and doctors are nearly always working with incomplete information. Mistakes are unfortunate but also inevitable. The most you can and should ask for is that the doctor treated you with the appropriate standard of care.
They want no patient oversight of what they are doing because a 5 minutes google search might convince you they are not doing a stellar job after all.
It is terrifying that some people think that 5 minutes on google somehow will make them more informed than 10 years of medical training plus years of actual medical practice. Self diagnosis via google is a HUGE problem because disease processes are complicated and there are a lot of subtle distinctions the lay-person will not know anything about. Yes, sometimes the doctor might miss something but the vast majority of the time you will observe the doctor having a better batting average on the diagnosis than the patient.
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From your lack of knowledge about the history of science and bigotry and ignorance about religion...
Since I have provided very little evidence regarding the depth (or lack) of my knowledge you are not in a position to evaluate. I do however seem to be making you quite uncomfortable. Your ad-hominem attack leads me to believe you do not have anything substantial to add to the conversation. In short, either prove me wrong with facts or bugger off.
So something is only science if it follows the scientific method?
Yes. By definition that is correct.
We can ignore that science did not always means scientific method or that the scientific method didn't even come about until some time in the 17th century.
The scientific method is much older than you apparently believe. While the modern approach didn't fully develop until roughly the 17th century, it was in use much much earlier than that. Being conscious of the fact you are using the scientific method is not a requirement of the method. Science has been conducted for a long time. However invoking supernatural beings violates the requirement for observable evidence and therefore cannot be science by definition.
The very earliest religions *were* attempts at science (granted, not very good ones by today's standards, but nevertheless they followed the idea of observing natural phenomenon and attempted to produce explanations for them).
This is incorrect. Just because it is an attempt at an explanation does not make it science. The scientific method requires empirical and measurable evidence to support a theory. Any invocation of a supernatural being immediately violates both of these requirements and therefore is not science.
The fact is most people who badmouth religion and it's connection to science know very little about religion itself.
It is actually quite easy to find people who are rather knowledgeable about both. And frankly one does not have to dig very deep into religion to find the deep logical problems with the stories its practitioners represent as truth.
It became broken when FDR fucked the constitution and started transfer payments.
Ummm, sure... whatever. I'll just nod my head and pretend that makes any sense at all even though it doesn't.
Now that a majority of voters don't pay significant taxes we are permanently fucked.
Where did you get a ridiculous notion like that? Your name isn't Mitt Romney by an chance is it? Most people pay quite a lot of taxes. Not enough to cover Social Security, Defense and Medicare but they pay about 2-3 Trillion per year to the federal government alone. Most pay some combination of Federal Income tax, FICA (Social security + Medicare), State income tax, property tax, vehicle registration, gas tax, and quite a few more.
The Ds think they don't have a spending problem. The Rs think only the Ds have a spending problem.
It's not solely a problem with either the Ds or the Rs really. It's a problem with the voters who elect them. Their disagreements usually are just a symptom of the problem. WE are the ones who demand all these services (medicare, defense, etc) but WE are the ones who vote people out of office who dare to suggest it will cost something and that we might have to pay taxes for them. WE are the the ones who refuse to acknowledge that we might not actually need 11 aircraft carrier battle groups or perhaps we might be ok with a bit less Medicare. Our leaders are to an alarming degree a reflection of our own dysfunction. It's easy to blame them but collectively if we want to point fingers the mirror is a good place to start.
Part of my frustration with the situation, is that there is very little true culpability for non-obvious mistakes. When I say 'non-obvious' I'm not talking about mistakes which are easy to make, but consequences which are not easily traced back to actual blatant mistakes.
Here's a little secret. You don't actually want every mistake to be easily found and punished. Really, you don't. Even ignoring for a moment that humans are imperfect and that we all make mistakes sometimes. Here's the reason why. The ONLY way to learn medicine is to practice it on real, live humans. Aspiring doctors are very smart and study hard but you cannot really learn medicine until you do it on actual people. Like every other activity, when you are learning it you will make a lot of mistakes. Most if not all doctors have probably unintentionally killed and certainly hurt someone with one of their mistakes. All of them. Wrong diagnosis, wrong prescription, wrong or incorrectly performed procedure, etc. Why do we allow all these mistakes? Because on the whole they get far more right than wrong and medicine is unambiguously beneficial to society.
Doctors are often working with incomplete and/or misleading information. A lot of "mistakes" are only revealed as such after the fact even for the most experienced of doctors. If doctors were punished for every mistake they make, it would be impossible to practice medicine. The risk would simply be too high. Naturally there needs to be standards (high ones) and there is no excuse for not putting forth every effort to achieve the appropriate standard of care. But you can take it too far and punish errors so much that we hurt our ability to treat patients. Let me give you an example. In at least one state I'm aware of, OB/GYNs are potentially liable for any illness a child develops until the time they are 18 years old, including for things that there is no demonstrable connection possible between the actions of the doctor and the patient's outcome. As a result, lots of doctors have gotten out of the specialty because the cost and personal risk has become too high.
I'm married to a doctor. She's the most diligent and conscientiousness person I know and she's damn good at her job. But she would be the first to tell you that she isn't perfect and even if she was perfect and made the best possible call on every patient she STILL would get a significant number of diagnosis wrong because we simply do not know enough about the human body and we do not have perfect information.
Bear in mind as well that every doctor is, at best, delaying the inevitable. You WILL die sooner or later. All a doctor can do is maybe delay it a while and hopefully make you a bit more comfortable along the way. Be demanding of your doctor (they can handle it) but also be a little forgiving as well. They really are trying to help you.
Thankfully my relative survived and is well now.
I'm very pleased to hear that. Thanks for sharing your story.
Reading through your story it really isn't so much a problem with a single individual (though that was a part of it) but rather that the communication processes used at that medical facility were insufficiently robust. The nurses and support staff simply aren't going to know about an adverse reaction unless special measures are taken to communicate that information. Even if it is in the chart that isn't always enough. Using the allergy flag was an excellent idea since it accomplishes the correct result and its something the staff is used to dealing with.
FYI, I'm married to a doctor and I've worked doing process improvement in a hospital. Most people there genuinely want to do a good job but sometimes the design of their work processes is lacking. Medicine is a complicated affair and it's sometimes shockingly easy for important information to not be adequately communicated.
Both sides are not equally wrong, but that doesn't mean both sides are right. The Republicans are wrong 99% of the time. The Democrats are wrong 95% of the time. Why can't we field a candidate who's right even half the time?
Because "right" is for better or worse often a matter of opinion. There is no single objectively right answer for many questions. Think abortion or gun control. Lots of opinions on both sides but there is never going to be a single "right" answer. At best there might be a consensus but probably never a unanimous one. Even for questions where a single objectively right answer may theoretically exist, there often is insufficient data to figure out what that answer is. (for example what is the optimal tax rate)
Deadlocking them produces the best feasible outcome.
Except on the periodic occasion when we need them to do actually something. You know, like not endlessly raise the national debt because they want to promise everything but don't want to have to tell the voters they have to actually pay for it someday.
We're going to have to wait centuries before evidence based public policy becomes the norm.
I think you are being optimistic. Very optimistic.
Since when did South by Southwest become a tech conference?
Apparently sometime around 1995 though that part of the festival doesn't appear to have come into prominence until about 2005 or so.
Of course in the US the car is king, but the UK Highways code suggests that you :
Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we're all aware of driving defensively and at a speed safe for the conditions. Utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It is demonstrably safe to drive at high speeds under a wide variety of circumstances. If you are not a drive capable of handling perfectly normal driving speeds like 50+mph then you should not be on the road at all. I've been driving about 25000 miles per year for the last 20 years (that's about a half million miles driven). Much of that has been at speeds as high as 80mph without an accident or other serious incident. While driving is not without some risk, it is a relatively safe activity on well designed and marked roads. That said, I not you did not bother to address the question posed, namely how does one stop in 20 yards from any speed?
The simple fact is that you CANNOT physically stop in 20 yards at any speed higher than about 35-40 miles per hour no matter what you are driving. 2000+ pounds of metal cannot stop that fast on two square feet of rubber. Cannot be done. That does not however mean that it is unsafe to drive at higher speeds.
I think that pretty much covers everyone who is complaining about amber lights, indeed if a traffic light is green, there is only one way the light is going to go - and it's not to blue.
A stupid argument. The ENTIRE point of the yellow light is to give drivers sufficient time to decelerate to a stop before it turns red. If the yellow light is on for too short a time to stop given the speed limit, then you adjust the length of the yellow light. You do not ask every driver to drive considerably slower than the speed limit just in case the light might suddenly change.
There's an argument to be made that fine revenue should be used to defray the costs of parking and traffic enforcement.
I already pay taxes to do that. I have a HUGE problem with the idea of government depending on people breaking laws to fund their operations. It is essentially an indirect form of graft.
I wonder if the judge stopped to think that this is no different than without the cameras. Tickets are a major revenue source for police departments, to the extent that it is not uncommon to hear of stations which have ticket quotas.
There are some very important differences. First is that the accuser in this case is a human who I have a right to face in court should I feel the need. I cannot do that with a camera and a faceless management company. Second, the police officer can make allowances for a situation outside of normal parameters. Sometimes weird things happen. Third, the effectiveness of speed cameras as a safety measure is very much in doubt. Their effectiveness as a revenue generation tool is not in any doubt. Speed cameras are almost always used primarily as a revenue source and have no other purpose than to fine speeders. If no one speeds then they make no economic sense. Police officers have numerous other functions and make sense whether or not people speed.
Finally, and probably most important, I have a HUGE problem with governments depending on people breaking the law as a means of funding regardless of the means used. Any revenue gathered from fining speeders should not be accessible to fund government operations. There should be NO direct financial incentive for governments to benefit from people breaking the law. If it is about safety then it should only be about safety and revenue should not need to play into it.
On general principle, if we could trust authorities, red light cameras are a really good idea.
Our government is premised on the idea that our trust in authorities should be strongly limited. That is why we require warrants, have separation of powers, etc. And I disagree that they are a really good idea. They demonstrably cause more of certain types of accidents (rear end collisions), it is very unclear that they improve public safety, and their primary purpose is to raise revenue for local governments.
Car speedometers are accurate enough these days that there is no need for any tolerance.
They demonstrably are not that accurate. Your speedometer can vary by up to 2% simply due to tire pressure and tread depth variations. Most are fairly close but if the difference between getting a ticket or not is whether I was 3kph or 4kph over the limit then they are not accurate enough to be certain.
Generally speaking speedometers are accurate to +/-10%. In the US they can have a variation of +/- 5mph at 50mph. This means that at 60mph you could be as much as 3mph high or low. Factors such as tread depth, tire pressure and other variations cannot be controlled by the manufacturer and can cause a variation of 1-2% easily. Interestingly lower priced cars tend to have more accurate speedometers than higher priced cars and speedometers are usually wrong by a bit over 1mph. By international agreement the indicated speed should never be lower than the actual speed. This makes sense since going slower than you think you are is generally a safer situation for most people most times.
If people are not paying attention and speeding through the city just to get somewhere else, fuck 'em, write 'em tickets so they learn to slow down or find a different route.
These speed cameras are there to gather revenue, not slow down traffic. The city has a conflict of interest built in. If they really want to control the speed of traffic there are many more effective means of doing so. Police presence, speed bumps, road design, stop signs, etc. Speed cameras are just a cash grab. Furthermore there is no opportunity to face your accuser, the speed camera cannot make allowances for unusual conditions or circumstances and frankly speed limits are not really supposed to be hard upper limits and NEVER have been treated that way by societal convention or enforcement.
Perhaps I am jaded by all the people speeding down my street rushing to the highway on ramps. 35MPH and not many are doing it.
Then either lobby your governement for additional speed control measures or change the speed limit to something more reasonable. If everyone is ignoring the speed limit, there is a strong chance that it is set unreasonably low. Happens all the time, sometimes on purpose. There is a road near our local airport that has a 45 mph speed limit and by all reasonable measures it should be 55 or 60mph at that location. Instead the town uses it as a well known speed trap and collects a lot of revenue. I've also seen roads that had their speed limit set by local statute but where the actual reasonable speed was somewhat different. There is a road on my way to work where the speed limit is 50mph but unless you are in a high performance car on a dry day, good luck going that fast and remaining on the road in the turns. Conversely I've seen plenty of roads where the speed limit was set to 35 or 45 mph but should have been 5-10mph higher.
I've taken to tossing gravel at them as they race by while waiting to put my kindergartener on her school bus.
Then you are an asshole. You think you have the right to damage property just because you dislike how someone else is behaving? I think the phrase about people in glass houses not throwing stones is particularly apt in this case. If I saw you doing that I'd call the police on you and probably try to get you doing it on film.
If you're driving so fast towards a traffic light that you can't stop in twenty yards without screeching the tires, you're doing it wrong, yes.
Really? The road in front of my house has a speed limit of 50mph. Explain to me how I can stop from the posted speed limit of 50mph in my truck within anything close to twenty yards. Even a Corvette ZR1 with huge brakes and tires can only do 60-0 in about 31 yards. For a lot of driving conditions and situations what you are suggesting is physically impossible. And no, driving like my grandmother is not a reasonable solution.
However, most of the expenses are fixed. The publisher spends money up front to produce a nice ebook, and then has a nice ebook that can be sold indefinitely at trivial additional expense.
It is trivial expense to produce but not trivial expense to sell. The model is very similar to software companies. Only about 10% of a software company's expenses are in engineering. The vast majority of the cost is in sales, marketing and overhead. Production of an ebook is similar to production of software - up front fixed costs that are recouped over time. Most of the costs to digital publishers are not in editing or production (their version of engineering). Most of their costs like software companies are also in sales, marketing and overhead which are pretty much the same whether the book is digital or paper. Even digital books do not sell themselves. You still have quite a lot of cost trying to convince people to buy the book.
Once the publisher has recouped original expenses, each additional copy sold is (except for royalties) almost pure profit.
I'm afraid that isn't actually true. The margins should be better for digital versus paper books but it isn't even close to pure proft. Plus you still have something of a distribution monopoly with Amazon and a few others if you want more than 5 people to read your book. You should expect the margins to be similar to a software company, Gross margins between 50-80% and net margins somewhere between 10-25% though depending on how they are distributed the numbers can be lower.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant and one of my clients is a publisher of books. I've dealt with this stuff professionally first hand.
how do you figure they stand to lose more revenue? for one, no overhead (or much less) to host a few meg/gig file than to have a warehouse of 1 million books.
Revenue is not the same thing as Profit. Revenue is how much you sell, Profit is how much you keep. Profit = (Revenue - Expenses). Just because Expenses are lower with digital media doesn't mean a thing by itself. Most of the costs for this sort of media are fixed so Revenue can drop without Expenses falling. If Revenue falls far enough then the company will lose money. It is logical that their revenue might fall but it doesn't automatically follow that they will become unprofitable.
Of course the whole notion of a digital items aftermarket is a bit peculiar...
So you will have to forgive me for not trusting 10+ years of experience vs google when the asshole kept giving tylenol to a guy with liver disease.
It's appropriate to check on what is being prescribed and be involved in your care when you have the ability. Even well intentioned doctors (and pharmacists) make mistakes. Odds are that there was a problem with communication and that it was an honest mistake. Doctor's that would intentionally or negligently harm a patient are quite rare.
That said, if you felt the patient was being intentionally mis-treated or incompetently treated then one has to ask why you continued to let this doctor treat the patient? If this guy was such an "asshole" then you can and should demand a different doctor be involved. You always have that right and you should exercise it if needed. What you are describing is grounds for a lawsuit. Did you bring one or are you just trying to bash doctors in general based on one anecdote?
if a doctor comes across someone who genuinely has a rare condition they're almost certain to misdiagnose it.
And a patient is even more likely to do so. A doctor is supposed to look to the highest probability diagnosis first. Rare diagnosis are hard and it's pretty rare for doctors to have perfect information. Almost every diagnosis is an educated guess and some percentage WILL be wrong. In fact sometimes getting a percentage wrong is considered appropriate care. Doctors are expected to take out a small percentage of appendixes that are not actually wrong. There is no way to know with 100% certainty whether it needs to come out until they actually do the operation and some symptoms can be mimicked by other conditions.
doctors are often too sure they have a deeper understanding than they really do.
This does happen but having a doctor that not confident is rather useless. It's a fine line to tread and most do it reasonably well.
Seems like nothing more than an arse-covering exercise and - if that's so - why do you have to cover your arse?
The same reason the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument is a fallacy. Doctors are sued all the time for various reasons, most of them rather frivolous but expensive and time consuming nonetheless. It isn't hard to twist medical records against you even if there is nothing actually improper contained within them.
If doctors think they are vulnerable to malpractice suits then clearly they are aware that their house needs to be cleaned.
It has nothing to do with how competently they practice or how high their professional standards are. The practice of medicine is an imperfect practice. We do not know everything about the human body and even with the best available medicine and exceeding standard of care doctors are going to be wrong a significant percentage of time and patients are going to sometimes have bad outcomes. All a doctor can do is provide the appropriate standard of care when treating a patient. We should not expect less than standard of care but more cannot reasonably be expected of them.
I'm not arguing for or against patient access to medical records but there are several problems with patients having free access to their medical records. First, most patients do not actually understand a great deal of the information contained in the medical records and often will not react appropriately. It is common for people to think 5 minutes on google somehow will provide more insight than 20 years of medical training and practice. Second, it is very easy for a lawyer to twist the story told by even very meticulous records that meet standard of care into a story indicating that the doctor was somehow negligent even when that is not actually the case.
Of course doctors don't want their misdeeds and incompetence on display for all to see.
Ok, how comfortable are you with detailed records of your workplace performance being handed to the public? If you say it's fine I'll call you a liar. Are your professional standards as high as those required of doctors? (for the record I'm rather confident that they are not) It's easy to throw stones. Doctors are held to very high standards and rightly so. It's unfortunate that the same is not required of everyone else.
I guess doctors make wrong or let's say suboptimal decisions all the time, it's just that rarely people get so bad or die because of it so you actually get into malpraxis discussions.
Doctors do make mistakes just like any human. The human body is a complicated thing and doctors are nearly always working with incomplete information. Mistakes are unfortunate but also inevitable. The most you can and should ask for is that the doctor treated you with the appropriate standard of care.
They want no patient oversight of what they are doing because a 5 minutes google search might convince you they are not doing a stellar job after all.
It is terrifying that some people think that 5 minutes on google somehow will make them more informed than 10 years of medical training plus years of actual medical practice. Self diagnosis via google is a HUGE problem because disease processes are complicated and there are a lot of subtle distinctions the lay-person will not know anything about. Yes, sometimes the doctor might miss something but the vast majority of the time you will observe the doctor having a better batting average on the diagnosis than the patient.