[..] Trump had one major advantage in this election. He's not Hilliary Clinton. That, and only that, got him elected. [...]
I'd note that from some of the leaks, apparently they'd wanted him as an opponent on the off chance that people would decide that Trump was worse than her--which is its own major problem, since if you're having to worry about that...maybe you've anointed the wrong heir.
I think you're slightly off here on how free they were to pick who to run, too, but that's because I actually have found rather convincing that the popularity of both Trump and Saunder represented a popular rejection (on both the Left and Right) of the establishment--the problem of who we got as the alternate to the establishment is beside the point, though I think it's worth appreciating the irony of the establishment candidate ending up being the one run by the Left.
Actually, the credibility this round would be maintained by either remaining apolitical or going after both sides. The Left should not be escaping censure for its role in all of this, merely because their games finally didn't go in their favor...which is something that has been seen coming for decades. The only things that weren't certain was when and who, not that the sword of Damocles was going to fall.
Bigger problem: They would have to make their own international agreements because they would be their own, new country--and that would really add to their water problems since they likely would get nowhere near the amount they do now. (On the bright side, this will be better for the environment: we now know that the original agreement used a wet period; the 'drought' is actually what normal rainfall looks like for the region.)
Um, there's several fake news sites that do that, to the point that Snopes has a section devoted to listing the damn things. (Useful if you want to also see specific stories taken apart.) Most seem to be out to get clicks.
As several have pointed out, fixing gerrymandering would be necessary--though this might be the only way to create the required social and political pressures to pull that off. Personally, I'd actually like to see district lines as something that must be voted on--so if a region decides that it makes the most sense for them to use community boundaries for setting their lines, they can.
I would definitely require the maps used by any region to set the districts for anything be freely & easily available to the public in their 'raw' form--and the methods used to set any boundaries on that map that aren't physical parts of the territory be both transparent and conform to a widely-accepted standard. That includes political boundaries. We had a couple states realizing that whoops we kiiiinda lost our border this century--didn't make much news or anything, because they decided to do the equivalent of a quiet-but-frantic search together instead of fight it out like...well...the last time that happened sometime in the 90s or so... (I wish I was kidding, but basically a lot of the boundaries are based off of old documents that are...not always where we think they got stored, or which when we check them are...not as exact as could be wished, to put it mildly, or don't say what we've been assuming they did for...well, this case? We're talking centuries of 'misremembering' the documents' contents...)
But a pure popular vote means that basically anybody outside of the megalopolises doesn't matter enough--they're as important to a person who wants to be POTUS as a state seen as 'in the bag' is now. Instant runoffs might fix that, some, but only if the third parties actually got their acts together--this could have been their election cycle.
Actually, it was more convergent evolution. There's quite a few places that had functioning democracies when Europeans finally found them, including in the Americas, and Sudan actually managed to have a long-running functional anarchist...thing...going, dating back well before anarchists turned up. (It is still going, actually. They were understandably confused by the whole idea that laws come from government--for them, that's not how it works.)
Alright, let's make this instead a bunch of people voting on what to order for lunch instead, since it's easier to explain that way.
Once again, all parties are equally important. You just happen to know already that, say, Alice will want Chinese, Bob will want pizza, Charlie will want something Mexican. Daniel and Eva, our 'swing states,' however, might go for any of those...and thus have the deciding votes.
They are represented by their own government; the US is not a system where the top political slot goes to the party (or coalition) with the most seats in Parliament but one where the President is elected independently of Congress and Congressional seats are awarded by simple majorities.
The point at which in the US system you need to form the coalitions is on the party level, and you do it precisely to have a sufficiently broad base. This past cycle was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments where a third party, if it'd been willing to make that coalition, could have set itself up to knock out one of the big two--this has happened, and used to happen a bit more often. (I don't think the Green party could have done it; the Libertarian party could have done it by actually being libertarian...)
Actually, I'm not too sure you understand how democratic systems work. You think the DNC actually gives a flying fuck about if their political opponents get represented? Despite the leaks of what the inner party thinks of both their external and internal opponents that happened this year? (It's not the first time, but it's remarkable how public they got about it this year. It probably drove up the Stay At Home & Green Parties' shares.)
Having watched the State Department under Clinton and knowing that the only reason our relationship with Russia right now is any good is Russia, I didn't really think Clinton was going to do any better than Trump.
We're already in WW3, anyway. It started over a decade ago. Didn't you notice?
You do realize that those official unemployment numbers are kept artificially low by not counting anybody who is underemployed--occasionally dramatically, given the gig economy--or who has basically given up bothering because the odds of success & likely payoff seem to be significantly less than the effort involved? It's been an ongoing complaint for decades that the US's unemployment numbers are not really giving an accurate picture...and changes in employment practices are only making this worse.
Funny thing, if you make it really expensive to have somebody as a full-time employee--well, you're going to end up with a lot of part-time workers and people who are officially not employees...and I'd like to note that the last may go up as they realize that this gets them out of the minimum wage laws.
Intent doesn't matter, results do. You can cause a lot of problems by being a well-intentioned person who doesn't know what you're talking about.
Requiring bills be visible to the public in their final form for a reasonable amount of time before they become law means you can't stick onto, say, a standard bill a rider that makes it a crime to hold the wrong political views, or backdooring something like SOPA or PIPA by having it be officially a bill banning setting small children on fire. Or you might with all good intentions pass a bill that you're utterly convinced will increase the rights of the minorities--never mind that it is at best merely theater and at worst outright harmful for those it is supposed to help. The 72 hour period also means you can't easily find a period where a bill that (rightfully) would get objected to by the public can be rushed through without the public noticing.
Honestly, I expect anything that needs to be taken care of faster to be prepared for ahead of time: if it can't wait that extra 72 hours, it probably oughtn't wait long enough for a law to get written, either. Legal code is much like computer code here: the best outcome you ought to expect is that it is merely an amazingly ugly kludge that (barely) functions...
Laws have also been forced to be gotten rid of because the courts decided to enforce them exactly as (lousily) written, making the law sufficiently obnoxious and odious that the legislative branch has been compelled to take time from their busy schedules to repeal bad laws. A bad law that isn't enforced tends to stay on the books...where it can be pulled out to cause problems when it is useful to the state, usually to get somebody annoying out of the state's way, or other forms of undesirable hijinks.
Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Yes, and if you want to encourage employees to spend more time being open to those? Nice, inviting breakrooms and lunch rooms (with decent lunch to be had!) will work wonders, especially if you have nice closed offices so employees have time to actually leave their desk to enjoy those things.
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I doubt HR has consulted any millennials and I doubt the 'cool' tech companies have large rooms with no partitions at all--though if they do I suppose that explains so, so much about all these data breeches. It's my understanding that physical access makes the task of breaking into a computer system distinctly easier, and a large office where it's child's play to walk in and get access to pretty much any computer you want would make this pretty easy.
It's not even like it'd be terribly hard to be unnoticed as you settled down to create the data breech if the employee workspace has a very 'lazily converted warehouse' feel...there'd be a better chance that everybody will just assume you're yet another new hire.
They are intentionally designed with metrics that are impossible to meet and the targets are open to interpenetration by managers
Hmmm textbook management even states that employee targets and metrics must be achievable in order to promote happiness an effort. Presenting someone with an unachievable goal will instantly demoralise them and will make their failing grade a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is business 101 kind of stuff, but this is Yahoo we're talking about so I'm not surprised. Epic failure on every level is almost ingrained in their corporate culture at this point.
Yes, and from my experiences working with Yahoo's services I'd say that it does predate Ms. Mayer.
Honestly, it could be as 'innocent' as an order from on high to improve diversity numbers getting translated by the corporate cultures as something best met not by trying to attract more diverse highers...but by using metrics for white male employees that deliberately could not be met and targets that were vague enough that you might as well not try. (That said, let me be clear: This would in no way be an excuse.)
The thing is, this is going to hurt overall morale. Just because you're not a target for elimination for being the wrong race/sex/whatever today doesn't actually increase your comfort.
Once it's established that these in charge--no matter who 'they' are--will find a way to justify mistreating somebody for being part of the 'wrong' group, no matter how good their intentions are...it merely becomes a question of when you'll be part of the wrong group.
Actually, gold is still pretty useful as an abstract representation of value now--for one, it certainly is vastly easier to conceal US$100 of gold on your person than the same value in cash. In fact, a quick lookup of its by-gram value right now indicates so little gold that the real trick would be doing it in a way you won't accidentally lose such a tiny piece of gold: 1 cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.28 grams (or thereabouts)...and at current prices, that is about $800 worth of gold. This is actually a major reason why jewelry is traditionally popular in some groups: you'll have to sell it to get the local currency, but it's pretty portable, even when leaving countries that frown on removing more than pocket change amounts of their currency from their borders.
Also, I'm a bit amused that you describe it an abstract representation of value, given that paper money actually started as an abstract representation of precious metal coins--which were the original and wildly popular form of money for thousands of years. At this point? I suspect that if a major modern currency collapses...well, most if not all of them are fiat money, with value basically because we agree to act like they have value. There's nothing backing them and the barriers to their issuers devaluing their currency are pretty low--we're basically relying on there being somebody capable, willing, and smart enough to tell the politicians that they really can't print (too much) more to finance their latest schemes.
If money grew on trees as per the traditional statement by those lamenting its scarcity, we'd be one overzealous harvester away from economic collapse. (Give it a week.)
You're thinking the point of the research is to know more about chicken pox, aren't you?
Autoimmune diseases are pretty much the leading cause of death and disability in the US right now, so any basic research that might produce a better knowledge of how the immune system 'forgets' has the potential of producing some very significant benefits--the holy grail here probably is a way to basically edit the immune system's memory banks so we can remove 'bad' definitions. Any lead here is worth checking, even if you end up discovering that actually all of these 'otherwise healthy vaccine recipients' actually are cases of vaccine failure that had gotten hidden by herd immunity.
That last is still something we kind of need to know about, because wrong estimates of effectiveness and failure rates have implications, and past investigations into these sorts of things have caused changes to procedures. It might end up being just yet another round of reminders going out that if the vaccine is supposed to be stored in a fridge that means, amazingly enough, it needs to be stored in a fridge. It's been a bit over a decade since the last one for clinics that take care of humans, so we may be due. (I didn't study immunology specifically. I am in the biomedical field, and aiming to work in health care.)
Since you may need it: CDC doesn't reccomend that health care workers get a booster, so it looks like the current evidence may be that the 'otherwise healthy vaccine recipients' of your data point are currently suspected of being cases of vaccine failure. The effectiveness of two doses of this vaccine is listed as 90%, which is pretty respectable but does mean not everybody's going to actually come out with long-term immunity. (In fact, it means about one in ten people will get anything from a brief period of resistance to none whatsoever.)
I saw range listed as debated on the vaccine with no range but 'probably lifelong but weaker,' and I'd be rather less skeptical of the '20 years' number if there was a push to get people to get boosters--which can extend the length and strength of protection--as adults, since you can catch Varicella as an adult, and it's both significantly worse, enough to send somebody to a hospital, and significantly different. (It just happened to be rare, originally, because it required you pull off the astonishing feat of not catching Varicella until an adult.)
However, I'm not precisely surprised, though I'd actually wonder if the lifelong was really a thing even with the wildtype--or if you just got regular re-ups because kids around you got you infected before your immune system decided it no longer needed to store that 'virus definition.' That immunity is not necessarily lifelong (and can be merely effectively so) is actually relatively recent as discoveries go, and the time spans dealt with are long enough that the potential importance and implications are not always even realized to be an issue needing considering.
As for the retrovirus rewriting your DNA thing, I'd not expect much chance of getting informed consent from people if you told them the complete truth no matter how harmless. A lot of people find the very idea of 'rewriting your DNA' super-scary and unnatural, and good damn luck getting them to pause in their panic long enough to listen to the minor fact that not only is it very natural, but some rather beneficial genes got into the human genome because a 'smart' retrovirus basically decided that it was going to be more successful if it improved its hosts' survival... Honestly, I suspect people would flip out if some mutant strain of some minor retrovirus ended up giving you a rather mild infection as it inserted itself into your genome and cured obesity. After all, it's still scaryscary retrovirus, it must turn you into a (skinny) zombie-vampire-werewolf! Even if it's too damn tiny to do more than accidentally cause a beneficial gene tweak and even that's a surprise.
The term originally used is 'ape,' with a link to the page on Wikipedia giving the formal definition of the group of ape.
I'm not sure how to break it to you all, but by sheer definition all humans are apes. In point of fact, humans are the type species for the superfamily of apes, meaning that even if all the other species in that superfamily turn out to not be related to humans--humans will still be apes, because that's how type species roll.
But hey, I guess the same type of stupidity involved in thinking these bunkers are likely to work out well makes it okay to say it's racist to call a group of humans something that, if they're not, they cannot be human.
Seriously, if people know where to find your bunker you got a Problem, especially if you're expecting to power it with wind or solar which means there's going to be essential tech just out there and vulnerable. I don't think anybody has to be particularly intelligent to do a good job of locating and wrecking either once they know the general area to look in after a disaster. Maybe these people can't imagine the serfs being smart enough to use the ancient technology known as 'maps' after a disaster bad enough to go into bunkers...?
I'd say the main reason to go with precious metals--specifically gold--is its durability (in the 'does not noticeably suffer from oxidation' sense) and the fact that it's been used by many cultures for many years...because of that and its rarity. It's likely coins sometimes were considered for exchange purposes as worth what we'd call their scrap value, simply because the issuer was too far away for the locals to know who these Roman jokers are which would make fiat currency a bit hard to trade. (If the country isn't known to the locals, your money is essentially play money.)
You also don't necessarily want to have to rely on trade goods, because see any story involving a barter chain. Money lets you circumvent it when you can't or don't want to resort to it--and, before modern transportation, it was risky to bet that your trade goods were a surefire hit. That's pretty much entirely why money got so popular.
Basically? Yes, you want things like basic tools and seed stocks--but you also want some sort of money, and for a while it's probably going to be precious metals of known & verifiable purity in units of known weight simply because nobody wants that much to try making change for, say, a cow.
On the flu shot, though--I've heard reports that some people have found it to be effective for multiple years,
The fact is that about half the time, they target the wrong flu strain, and the flu vaccine is utterly and completely useless. In those years, anyone who thinks the flu strain kept them from getting flu is total a fucking moron who is operating on confirmation bias.
Actually, in this case the question is the more important one of how long and how broad the immunity provided against the flu by that particular vaccine are--which has all sorts of implications.
Vaccination is a legitimate practice, but the flu shot is utterly and totally useless about half the time. They know well before they are administering the shots whether there is actually any point to doing so, by monitoring the spread of various flu strains, but they will never, ever put that information out there to potential customers. That job is always left to the media, most of which couldn't care less. Anti-vaxxers are loud, but there's not enough of them to sell papers to for them to jump on that grenade, so they just ignore it and Americans waste millions on pointless flu shots.
And then people wonder why there are people who mistrust vaccines, because they are dumb shits too.
Well, the media also tends to be ignorant of its own ignorance, and I'd certainly not expect them to grasp that the flu is pretty rapidly-mutating--to the point that if you actually get more than a flu season's worth of immunity from the flu shot, the better strategy would be to either go with a big expensive broad-spectrum one with annual booster-updates to add that year's new strains (pretty much a certainty) or a series that is less rough on your body and over time will maintain a decent broad spectrum of immunity even if it takes a while to achieve that point.
However, this requires expecting the public to grasp that for some infections there may never be a good generic vaccine--that even if there is a highly-conserved portion of its genes, it may not be a viable vaccine target--and any vaccine is going to be limited in what versions it can actually hit.
This actually is a major--if not the major--reason we don't have an HIV vaccine yet. As early as the 90s there were some pretty good prospects, but they were also pretty specific. It was a given that even if this protected you against the strains you were most likely to catch, there were many other, rarer strains and you'd still be totally able to get those. It was also considered pretty much a given that, as you note, people are dumb: No matter how clear you are, they're still going to mean they got total and perfect protection from alllll the strains, and when the first one manages to catch something serious because they thought this meant they didn't have to use some sense.. The media is going to be going into a "OMG OMG OMG TEH VACCINE DOESN'T WORK!!!1!one!" frenzy (because panics are the ancestor of clickbait) instead of the more accurate "Moron discovers that the vaccine only supposed to protect against some strains does exactly that." Oh, and if said moron's trial lawyer is decent, the jury will probably be right there with the media in not grasping that limited protection is--amazingly--limited.
At least with the flu vaccine, the social costs of a misfire are lower, though as I've noted, somebody whose immune system is fine and who doesn't spend lots of time around people whose immune systems are compromised? Outside of the really nasty strains of the flu, they're just plain better off catching it. Ditto the common cold--if any improvement can be had, I'd actually vote for having it possible to schedule when you get it and choose a nice, mild strain.
I have rather little hope that we're going to get people in general more aware of the complexity of trying to make a vaccine for anything that refuses to have
He may be talking about Varicella. IIRC, the immunity from the vaccine doesn't last as long as the immunity conferred by actually having the disease. Wouldn't that potentially protect from the disease in the very young where it is rarely a problem and then leave you vulnerable just when it starts to become more risky (potentially a net harm)? Meanwhile, (also IIRC), occasional exposure as a naturally immune adult is thought to act as a sort of booster to prevent shingles later in life.
Your memory is weird: A quick check confirms that the Varicella vaccine is a live, weak virus one--and the sole reason I needed to check is because practically all the vaccines of that age are either that or dead virus...and a few take a mixed-approach by using one for the vaccine and another for the booster. (When I say some background, I mean "I have less than somebody who went for immunology as their specialty."
The shot for shingles--herpes zoraster--is pretty much nothing but a variant on the Varicella vaccine, making it a booster for those who got their immunity from wildtype Varicella.
I should note that I had to check because my records before college--absolutely all of them aside from my birth certificate--got completely and entirely lost, so...basically? If you get the Varicella vaccine yet again, it'll just boost immunity. The strength and duration of said immunity--regardless of how you got it--is something we're not so sure of, but given that we know that sometimes it's more like apparent lifelong immunity...finding out is going to require having a nice large age range of people who got the vaccine young, all of them willing to be deliberately infected.
I'm pretty sure I could get the study proposal through the ethics board, there's nothing unethical here and it's an important enough question. I just doubt anybody will consent to being deliberately given a virus that inserts itself into their genome, just to see if their immune system still will recognize the virus and produce antibodies to it.
The case is pretty strong for MMR and DTaP, but not so much for Varicella vaccine.
Oh, yes, though neither actually should be expected to grant lifelong immunity because as I noted we're starting to realize that no, what you get is really long immunity and with Rubella the flier they give you so you can give proper consent pretty explicitly says that your immune system will start to lose that virus definition from its memory banks in about two years. I don't remember what the time period was on the DTaP, and my copy of the flier is gone. (I had to get nearly all my childhood shots again, because my records were lost...)
As for the flu, I recall some recent research that shows that people who have been immunized for flu the previous year are less likely to be effectively immunized by a new flu vaccine. Meanwhile, since (as you said) the available flu shot is based on a guess at which strains will become prevalent, there is a good chance that the guess will be wrong and so the shot will have very limited effectiveness. It may actually be better to confine flu shots to the most vulnerable populations where the flu itself is most dangerous.
Sometimes it'll be even more effective to vaccinate those who are around those who are the most vulnerable, because the reason they're vulnerable is a compromised immune system--so it's better to try to keep them from getting infected in the first place.
Overall...well, I think if you really want a good flu shot, a more generic version of the vaccine may be best--and even then, confine it to a limited population. Given what has to be done with autoimmune disorders to control them, and how weak many flu strains are, it might actually be less risky to set it up so you can get deliberately dosed with a weak strain of the flu--but that would require society be prepared to accept that the occasional mild illness is not bad for you.
When immediate action is necessary, or an appearance of decisiveness & strong leadership is essential, the difference between 'thoughtful and cautious' and 'indecisive and passive' when it can be debated which it is...comes down to things like "Is this person my boss's relative?"
Slashdot Mirror
[..] Trump had one major advantage in this election. He's not Hilliary Clinton. That, and only that, got him elected. [...]
I'd note that from some of the leaks, apparently they'd wanted him as an opponent on the off chance that people would decide that Trump was worse than her--which is its own major problem, since if you're having to worry about that...maybe you've anointed the wrong heir.
I think you're slightly off here on how free they were to pick who to run, too, but that's because I actually have found rather convincing that the popularity of both Trump and Saunder represented a popular rejection (on both the Left and Right) of the establishment--the problem of who we got as the alternate to the establishment is beside the point, though I think it's worth appreciating the irony of the establishment candidate ending up being the one run by the Left.
Actually, the credibility this round would be maintained by either remaining apolitical or going after both sides. The Left should not be escaping censure for its role in all of this, merely because their games finally didn't go in their favor...which is something that has been seen coming for decades. The only things that weren't certain was when and who, not that the sword of Damocles was going to fall.
Bigger problem: They would have to make their own international agreements because they would be their own, new country--and that would really add to their water problems since they likely would get nowhere near the amount they do now. (On the bright side, this will be better for the environment: we now know that the original agreement used a wet period; the 'drought' is actually what normal rainfall looks like for the region.)
Um, there's several fake news sites that do that, to the point that Snopes has a section devoted to listing the damn things. (Useful if you want to also see specific stories taken apart.) Most seem to be out to get clicks.
Then your vote becomes worthless if you don't live in a megalopolis!
As several have pointed out, fixing gerrymandering would be necessary--though this might be the only way to create the required social and political pressures to pull that off. Personally, I'd actually like to see district lines as something that must be voted on--so if a region decides that it makes the most sense for them to use community boundaries for setting their lines, they can.
I would definitely require the maps used by any region to set the districts for anything be freely & easily available to the public in their 'raw' form--and the methods used to set any boundaries on that map that aren't physical parts of the territory be both transparent and conform to a widely-accepted standard. That includes political boundaries. We had a couple states realizing that whoops we kiiiinda lost our border this century--didn't make much news or anything, because they decided to do the equivalent of a quiet-but-frantic search together instead of fight it out like...well...the last time that happened sometime in the 90s or so... (I wish I was kidding, but basically a lot of the boundaries are based off of old documents that are...not always where we think they got stored, or which when we check them are...not as exact as could be wished, to put it mildly, or don't say what we've been assuming they did for...well, this case? We're talking centuries of 'misremembering' the documents' contents...)
But a pure popular vote means that basically anybody outside of the megalopolises doesn't matter enough--they're as important to a person who wants to be POTUS as a state seen as 'in the bag' is now. Instant runoffs might fix that, some, but only if the third parties actually got their acts together--this could have been their election cycle.
Actually, it was more convergent evolution. There's quite a few places that had functioning democracies when Europeans finally found them, including in the Americas, and Sudan actually managed to have a long-running functional anarchist...thing...going, dating back well before anarchists turned up. (It is still going, actually. They were understandably confused by the whole idea that laws come from government--for them, that's not how it works.)
Alright, let's make this instead a bunch of people voting on what to order for lunch instead, since it's easier to explain that way.
Once again, all parties are equally important. You just happen to know already that, say, Alice will want Chinese, Bob will want pizza, Charlie will want something Mexican. Daniel and Eva, our 'swing states,' however, might go for any of those...and thus have the deciding votes.
Bad statistics, at that.
They are represented by their own government; the US is not a system where the top political slot goes to the party (or coalition) with the most seats in Parliament but one where the President is elected independently of Congress and Congressional seats are awarded by simple majorities.
The point at which in the US system you need to form the coalitions is on the party level, and you do it precisely to have a sufficiently broad base. This past cycle was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments where a third party, if it'd been willing to make that coalition, could have set itself up to knock out one of the big two--this has happened, and used to happen a bit more often. (I don't think the Green party could have done it; the Libertarian party could have done it by actually being libertarian...)
Actually, I'm not too sure you understand how democratic systems work. You think the DNC actually gives a flying fuck about if their political opponents get represented? Despite the leaks of what the inner party thinks of both their external and internal opponents that happened this year? (It's not the first time, but it's remarkable how public they got about it this year. It probably drove up the Stay At Home & Green Parties' shares.)
Having watched the State Department under Clinton and knowing that the only reason our relationship with Russia right now is any good is Russia, I didn't really think Clinton was going to do any better than Trump.
We're already in WW3, anyway. It started over a decade ago. Didn't you notice?
[...] America, land of 4.9% unemployment, [...]
You do realize that those official unemployment numbers are kept artificially low by not counting anybody who is underemployed--occasionally dramatically, given the gig economy--or who has basically given up bothering because the odds of success & likely payoff seem to be significantly less than the effort involved? It's been an ongoing complaint for decades that the US's unemployment numbers are not really giving an accurate picture...and changes in employment practices are only making this worse.
Funny thing, if you make it really expensive to have somebody as a full-time employee--well, you're going to end up with a lot of part-time workers and people who are officially not employees...and I'd like to note that the last may go up as they realize that this gets them out of the minimum wage laws.
Intent doesn't matter, results do. You can cause a lot of problems by being a well-intentioned person who doesn't know what you're talking about.
Requiring bills be visible to the public in their final form for a reasonable amount of time before they become law means you can't stick onto, say, a standard bill a rider that makes it a crime to hold the wrong political views, or backdooring something like SOPA or PIPA by having it be officially a bill banning setting small children on fire. Or you might with all good intentions pass a bill that you're utterly convinced will increase the rights of the minorities--never mind that it is at best merely theater and at worst outright harmful for those it is supposed to help. The 72 hour period also means you can't easily find a period where a bill that (rightfully) would get objected to by the public can be rushed through without the public noticing.
Honestly, I expect anything that needs to be taken care of faster to be prepared for ahead of time: if it can't wait that extra 72 hours, it probably oughtn't wait long enough for a law to get written, either. Legal code is much like computer code here: the best outcome you ought to expect is that it is merely an amazingly ugly kludge that (barely) functions...
Laws have also been forced to be gotten rid of because the courts decided to enforce them exactly as (lousily) written, making the law sufficiently obnoxious and odious that the legislative branch has been compelled to take time from their busy schedules to repeal bad laws. A bad law that isn't enforced tends to stay on the books...where it can be pulled out to cause problems when it is useful to the state, usually to get somebody annoying out of the state's way, or other forms of undesirable hijinks.
Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Yes, and if you want to encourage employees to spend more time being open to those? Nice, inviting breakrooms and lunch rooms (with decent lunch to be had!) will work wonders, especially if you have nice closed offices so employees have time to actually leave their desk to enjoy those things.
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I doubt HR has consulted any millennials and I doubt the 'cool' tech companies have large rooms with no partitions at all--though if they do I suppose that explains so, so much about all these data breeches. It's my understanding that physical access makes the task of breaking into a computer system distinctly easier, and a large office where it's child's play to walk in and get access to pretty much any computer you want would make this pretty easy.
It's not even like it'd be terribly hard to be unnoticed as you settled down to create the data breech if the employee workspace has a very 'lazily converted warehouse' feel...there'd be a better chance that everybody will just assume you're yet another new hire.
They are intentionally designed with metrics that are impossible to meet and the targets are open to interpenetration by managers
Hmmm textbook management even states that employee targets and metrics must be achievable in order to promote happiness an effort. Presenting someone with an unachievable goal will instantly demoralise them and will make their failing grade a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is business 101 kind of stuff, but this is Yahoo we're talking about so I'm not surprised. Epic failure on every level is almost ingrained in their corporate culture at this point.
Yes, and from my experiences working with Yahoo's services I'd say that it does predate Ms. Mayer.
Honestly, it could be as 'innocent' as an order from on high to improve diversity numbers getting translated by the corporate cultures as something best met not by trying to attract more diverse highers...but by using metrics for white male employees that deliberately could not be met and targets that were vague enough that you might as well not try. (That said, let me be clear: This would in no way be an excuse.)
The thing is, this is going to hurt overall morale. Just because you're not a target for elimination for being the wrong race/sex/whatever today doesn't actually increase your comfort.
Once it's established that these in charge--no matter who 'they' are--will find a way to justify mistreating somebody for being part of the 'wrong' group, no matter how good their intentions are...it merely becomes a question of when you'll be part of the wrong group.
Actually, gold is still pretty useful as an abstract representation of value now--for one, it certainly is vastly easier to conceal US$100 of gold on your person than the same value in cash. In fact, a quick lookup of its by-gram value right now indicates so little gold that the real trick would be doing it in a way you won't accidentally lose such a tiny piece of gold: 1 cubic centimeter of gold weighs 19.28 grams (or thereabouts)...and at current prices, that is about $800 worth of gold. This is actually a major reason why jewelry is traditionally popular in some groups: you'll have to sell it to get the local currency, but it's pretty portable, even when leaving countries that frown on removing more than pocket change amounts of their currency from their borders.
Also, I'm a bit amused that you describe it an abstract representation of value, given that paper money actually started as an abstract representation of precious metal coins--which were the original and wildly popular form of money for thousands of years. At this point? I suspect that if a major modern currency collapses...well, most if not all of them are fiat money, with value basically because we agree to act like they have value. There's nothing backing them and the barriers to their issuers devaluing their currency are pretty low--we're basically relying on there being somebody capable, willing, and smart enough to tell the politicians that they really can't print (too much) more to finance their latest schemes.
If money grew on trees as per the traditional statement by those lamenting its scarcity, we'd be one overzealous harvester away from economic collapse. (Give it a week.)
You're thinking the point of the research is to know more about chicken pox, aren't you?
Autoimmune diseases are pretty much the leading cause of death and disability in the US right now, so any basic research that might produce a better knowledge of how the immune system 'forgets' has the potential of producing some very significant benefits--the holy grail here probably is a way to basically edit the immune system's memory banks so we can remove 'bad' definitions. Any lead here is worth checking, even if you end up discovering that actually all of these 'otherwise healthy vaccine recipients' actually are cases of vaccine failure that had gotten hidden by herd immunity.
That last is still something we kind of need to know about, because wrong estimates of effectiveness and failure rates have implications, and past investigations into these sorts of things have caused changes to procedures. It might end up being just yet another round of reminders going out that if the vaccine is supposed to be stored in a fridge that means, amazingly enough, it needs to be stored in a fridge. It's been a bit over a decade since the last one for clinics that take care of humans, so we may be due. (I didn't study immunology specifically. I am in the biomedical field, and aiming to work in health care.)
Since you may need it: CDC doesn't reccomend that health care workers get a booster, so it looks like the current evidence may be that the 'otherwise healthy vaccine recipients' of your data point are currently suspected of being cases of vaccine failure. The effectiveness of two doses of this vaccine is listed as 90%, which is pretty respectable but does mean not everybody's going to actually come out with long-term immunity. (In fact, it means about one in ten people will get anything from a brief period of resistance to none whatsoever.)
I saw range listed as debated on the vaccine with no range but 'probably lifelong but weaker,' and I'd be rather less skeptical of the '20 years' number if there was a push to get people to get boosters--which can extend the length and strength of protection--as adults, since you can catch Varicella as an adult, and it's both significantly worse, enough to send somebody to a hospital, and significantly different. (It just happened to be rare, originally, because it required you pull off the astonishing feat of not catching Varicella until an adult.)
However, I'm not precisely surprised, though I'd actually wonder if the lifelong was really a thing even with the wildtype--or if you just got regular re-ups because kids around you got you infected before your immune system decided it no longer needed to store that 'virus definition.' That immunity is not necessarily lifelong (and can be merely effectively so) is actually relatively recent as discoveries go, and the time spans dealt with are long enough that the potential importance and implications are not always even realized to be an issue needing considering.
As for the retrovirus rewriting your DNA thing, I'd not expect much chance of getting informed consent from people if you told them the complete truth no matter how harmless. A lot of people find the very idea of 'rewriting your DNA' super-scary and unnatural, and good damn luck getting them to pause in their panic long enough to listen to the minor fact that not only is it very natural, but some rather beneficial genes got into the human genome because a 'smart' retrovirus basically decided that it was going to be more successful if it improved its hosts' survival... Honestly, I suspect people would flip out if some mutant strain of some minor retrovirus ended up giving you a rather mild infection as it inserted itself into your genome and cured obesity. After all, it's still scaryscary retrovirus, it must turn you into a (skinny) zombie-vampire-werewolf! Even if it's too damn tiny to do more than accidentally cause a beneficial gene tweak and even that's a surprise.
The term originally used is 'ape,' with a link to the page on Wikipedia giving the formal definition of the group of ape.
I'm not sure how to break it to you all, but by sheer definition all humans are apes. In point of fact, humans are the type species for the superfamily of apes, meaning that even if all the other species in that superfamily turn out to not be related to humans--humans will still be apes, because that's how type species roll.
But hey, I guess the same type of stupidity involved in thinking these bunkers are likely to work out well makes it okay to say it's racist to call a group of humans something that, if they're not, they cannot be human.
Seriously, if people know where to find your bunker you got a Problem, especially if you're expecting to power it with wind or solar which means there's going to be essential tech just out there and vulnerable. I don't think anybody has to be particularly intelligent to do a good job of locating and wrecking either once they know the general area to look in after a disaster. Maybe these people can't imagine the serfs being smart enough to use the ancient technology known as 'maps' after a disaster bad enough to go into bunkers...?
I'd say the main reason to go with precious metals--specifically gold--is its durability (in the 'does not noticeably suffer from oxidation' sense) and the fact that it's been used by many cultures for many years...because of that and its rarity. It's likely coins sometimes were considered for exchange purposes as worth what we'd call their scrap value, simply because the issuer was too far away for the locals to know who these Roman jokers are which would make fiat currency a bit hard to trade. (If the country isn't known to the locals, your money is essentially play money.)
You also don't necessarily want to have to rely on trade goods, because see any story involving a barter chain. Money lets you circumvent it when you can't or don't want to resort to it--and, before modern transportation, it was risky to bet that your trade goods were a surefire hit. That's pretty much entirely why money got so popular.
Basically? Yes, you want things like basic tools and seed stocks--but you also want some sort of money, and for a while it's probably going to be precious metals of known & verifiable purity in units of known weight simply because nobody wants that much to try making change for, say, a cow.
On the flu shot, though--I've heard reports that some people have found it to be effective for multiple years,
The fact is that about half the time, they target the wrong flu strain, and the flu vaccine is utterly and completely useless. In those years, anyone who thinks the flu strain kept them from getting flu is total a fucking moron who is operating on confirmation bias.
Actually, in this case the question is the more important one of how long and how broad the immunity provided against the flu by that particular vaccine are--which has all sorts of implications.
Vaccination is a legitimate practice, but the flu shot is utterly and totally useless about half the time. They know well before they are administering the shots whether there is actually any point to doing so, by monitoring the spread of various flu strains, but they will never, ever put that information out there to potential customers. That job is always left to the media, most of which couldn't care less. Anti-vaxxers are loud, but there's not enough of them to sell papers to for them to jump on that grenade, so they just ignore it and Americans waste millions on pointless flu shots.
And then people wonder why there are people who mistrust vaccines, because they are dumb shits too.
Well, the media also tends to be ignorant of its own ignorance, and I'd certainly not expect them to grasp that the flu is pretty rapidly-mutating--to the point that if you actually get more than a flu season's worth of immunity from the flu shot, the better strategy would be to either go with a big expensive broad-spectrum one with annual booster-updates to add that year's new strains (pretty much a certainty) or a series that is less rough on your body and over time will maintain a decent broad spectrum of immunity even if it takes a while to achieve that point.
However, this requires expecting the public to grasp that for some infections there may never be a good generic vaccine--that even if there is a highly-conserved portion of its genes, it may not be a viable vaccine target--and any vaccine is going to be limited in what versions it can actually hit.
This actually is a major--if not the major--reason we don't have an HIV vaccine yet. As early as the 90s there were some pretty good prospects, but they were also pretty specific. It was a given that even if this protected you against the strains you were most likely to catch, there were many other, rarer strains and you'd still be totally able to get those. It was also considered pretty much a given that, as you note, people are dumb: No matter how clear you are, they're still going to mean they got total and perfect protection from alllll the strains, and when the first one manages to catch something serious because they thought this meant they didn't have to use some sense.. The media is going to be going into a "OMG OMG OMG TEH VACCINE DOESN'T WORK!!!1!one!" frenzy (because panics are the ancestor of clickbait) instead of the more accurate "Moron discovers that the vaccine only supposed to protect against some strains does exactly that." Oh, and if said moron's trial lawyer is decent, the jury will probably be right there with the media in not grasping that limited protection is--amazingly--limited.
At least with the flu vaccine, the social costs of a misfire are lower, though as I've noted, somebody whose immune system is fine and who doesn't spend lots of time around people whose immune systems are compromised? Outside of the really nasty strains of the flu, they're just plain better off catching it. Ditto the common cold--if any improvement can be had, I'd actually vote for having it possible to schedule when you get it and choose a nice, mild strain.
I have rather little hope that we're going to get people in general more aware of the complexity of trying to make a vaccine for anything that refuses to have
He may be talking about Varicella. IIRC, the immunity from the vaccine doesn't last as long as the immunity conferred by actually having the disease. Wouldn't that potentially protect from the disease in the very young where it is rarely a problem and then leave you vulnerable just when it starts to become more risky (potentially a net harm)? Meanwhile, (also IIRC), occasional exposure as a naturally immune adult is thought to act as a sort of booster to prevent shingles later in life.
Your memory is weird: A quick check confirms that the Varicella vaccine is a live, weak virus one--and the sole reason I needed to check is because practically all the vaccines of that age are either that or dead virus...and a few take a mixed-approach by using one for the vaccine and another for the booster. (When I say some background, I mean "I have less than somebody who went for immunology as their specialty."
The shot for shingles--herpes zoraster--is pretty much nothing but a variant on the Varicella vaccine, making it a booster for those who got their immunity from wildtype Varicella.
I should note that I had to check because my records before college--absolutely all of them aside from my birth certificate--got completely and entirely lost, so...basically? If you get the Varicella vaccine yet again, it'll just boost immunity. The strength and duration of said immunity--regardless of how you got it--is something we're not so sure of, but given that we know that sometimes it's more like apparent lifelong immunity...finding out is going to require having a nice large age range of people who got the vaccine young, all of them willing to be deliberately infected.
I'm pretty sure I could get the study proposal through the ethics board, there's nothing unethical here and it's an important enough question. I just doubt anybody will consent to being deliberately given a virus that inserts itself into their genome, just to see if their immune system still will recognize the virus and produce antibodies to it.
The case is pretty strong for MMR and DTaP, but not so much for Varicella vaccine.
Oh, yes, though neither actually should be expected to grant lifelong immunity because as I noted we're starting to realize that no, what you get is really long immunity and with Rubella the flier they give you so you can give proper consent pretty explicitly says that your immune system will start to lose that virus definition from its memory banks in about two years. I don't remember what the time period was on the DTaP, and my copy of the flier is gone. (I had to get nearly all my childhood shots again, because my records were lost...)
As for the flu, I recall some recent research that shows that people who have been immunized for flu the previous year are less likely to be effectively immunized by a new flu vaccine. Meanwhile, since (as you said) the available flu shot is based on a guess at which strains will become prevalent, there is a good chance that the guess will be wrong and so the shot will have very limited effectiveness. It may actually be better to confine flu shots to the most vulnerable populations where the flu itself is most dangerous.
Sometimes it'll be even more effective to vaccinate those who are around those who are the most vulnerable, because the reason they're vulnerable is a compromised immune system--so it's better to try to keep them from getting infected in the first place.
Overall...well, I think if you really want a good flu shot, a more generic version of the vaccine may be best--and even then, confine it to a limited population. Given what has to be done with autoimmune disorders to control them, and how weak many flu strains are, it might actually be less risky to set it up so you can get deliberately dosed with a weak strain of the flu--but that would require society be prepared to accept that the occasional mild illness is not bad for you.
When immediate action is necessary, or an appearance of decisiveness & strong leadership is essential, the difference between 'thoughtful and cautious' and 'indecisive and passive' when it can be debated which it is...comes down to things like "Is this person my boss's relative?"