How did this get modded up as insightful? Naysaying is one thing, but wholly incorrect naysaying is anything but insightful.
* As a whole, people do not get as sick as in previous generations. The constant fuss over cleanliness reduces the general health of the immune system because of its lack of exposure to many diseases.
This is as silly a statement as "I do not take as many showers as most people, so my water is not as wet." The immune system works differently than how your muscles do, it does not function in a "use it or lose it" manner. When you are exposed to an antigen, you develop an acquired immune response to it allowing you to fight it faster in future exposures. This is not an issue with the avian flu because it is different from the other flu viruses that are, or have recently been, circulating through human populations (nobody has acquired immunity except for the people who have been infected and have lived). Whether or not people have been exposed to other germs will not change the immune response to a new flu virus. Additionally, during the 1918 flu those with the healthiest immune systems (people in their 20's and 30's) were more likely to die from flu infection (google "cytokine storm" to find out more). So your trite generalization does not apply to this situation.
* Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
You said it right there: "Scurvy is no longer common." Guess what, rickets isn't either. Vitamin deficiency diseases in the "civilized world" are not common. Making generalization about the quality of processed foods does not change that fact. Also, the terms "vitamin" and "nutrient" cannot be used interchangeably as they do not mean the same thing.
* Palliative diseases are of little use against a virus that causes tissue death in the lungs, encephalitis, and destruction of tissue membranes due to necrosis and apoptosis. H5N1 appears to cause a broad-spectrum attack on the human body in ways that aren't helped by rehydration or salt balance.
This statement is sheer nonsense. What is a palliative disease? I think you meant palliative treatments. Nobody expects "rehydration or salt balance" to affect the course of flu infection; the danger of highly virulent flu strains comes from hemorrhaging of alveoli tissues which causes anoxia. Yes, the flu causes vomiting and diarrhea but that's not what does you in. You might have confused the flu for cholera, which is treated with hydration and restoration of salts and sugars.
* The vast majority of people may live in their own bedrooms, but are more likely to congregate in large, relatively cramped areas for work, school (especially school!), and purchasing.
That's nothing new, people are social animals and our working, learning, entertainment, and shopping environments have always been crowded. But like the grandparent post said, what has changed is that our homes and hospitals are no longer as cramped as they once were. Some people think that this will reduce virulence of future pandemic flu strains because (I can't find a link now, but a recent article in Science theorized that the 1918 strain was particularly lethal because it had such an easy time with transmission in the trenches and hospitals of WWI in Europe. It falls in line with the "sick bird can fly, dead bird can't" reasoning that explains why highly virulent diseases like Ebola are not very transmissible and vice versa.)
The article specifically asks about grading tests, with no mention homework:
I find myself looking at handwritten tests and thinking 'there's gotta be a better way...'
Then tktk writes:
Collect the tests ...
And I respond:
Because test scores make up a large part of any final grade, sharing these results with other students is probably a no-no.
Then you write:
I fail to see how peer-graded homework that isn't handed in constitutes part of a student's "record."
That's super; I never suggested that there could be a problem with homework. I do think that peer-grading of exams is questionable, specifically I mentioned that it could be a violation of the students' rights.
Besides concerns about cheating, that practice is likely a violation of the student's right to privacy. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the release of any information from a student's education record. Because test scores make up a large part of any final grade, sharing these results with other students is probably a no-no.
This happened all the time in my high school.
Yeah, high school is a good place to stomp all over kid's rights. Somebody has to put them in their place...
The parasite the parent mentioned is Toxoplasma gondii. It effects the behavior of mice and rats as well; they have an inborn fear of cats, but parasite-infected individual are no longer afraid of cats and seem to even taunt them. Since cats are the ideal host for this parasite, this behavior helps it to complete its lifecycle. The eerie part is the effects that Toxoplasma gondii have on humans; while people aren't ready to attribute their behavior to a parasitic protozoa, it would certainly explain a lot;)
I stand corrected on Trichinella, thanks for the information.
I did take note of the "If handled properly" qualifier in the original post. I didn't bother to respond to it because I agree with you that doing it all yourself, from field to plate, would be ideal way to make sure it is done correctly. But this is an unusual case for food preparation now. With some exceptions (sportsmen in particular), there is a prevailing desire in our culture for this work to be done by someone else. My point is that you currently can't trust that someone else to do it well enough to allow you to get away with eating raw hamburger meat.
...if you are ethically unable to butcher your own meat, you really shouldn't be eating it at all...
Ethics are an important factor and I agree that there should be consistency between people's ethical feelings on killing animals and their willingness to consume their flesh. Time, facilities, expertise, and interest are also limiting factors. Not everyone can raise chickens and pigs at home or have the ability to hunt their own meat due to these factors.
I replied to you elsewhere so this post acts to clarify the part of the picture you are missing.
Imagine the inside of a meatpacking plant (and don't take my word for it, visit one some day): it's a factory where an animal enters on one side and food products exit on the other. Like any other modern factory it works as an assembly line, but in this case it can be better called a disassembly line. An 800lb animal turns into 800 1lb cuts of meat as it passes through a series of sharp objects. Because there is no standard cow (they are all different sizes) almost all of the sharp objects are large knives held by people. These people stay in the same spot on the disassembly line and make the same cut over and over on all the carcasses that pass by them. The working conditions are pretty horrid: it is very loud, you are working in close quarters with machines that will rip your arms off and other people wielding large knives, hunks of meat are swinging by you, the floor is slick with all sorts of fluids, and it is pretty chilly in there. To keep costs down and profits up, the assembly line runs dangerously fast and with almost no oversight from any internal or external safety agency. These workers are also unskilled labor, usually migrants from Central America (in US plants).
Now imagine what happens when one of the guys with a knife makes an imperfect cut and accidentally slices into the intestines of the carcass. He does not have a STOP button to stop the line so he can clean his knife and address the feces and bacteria leaking out onto the carcass. He just keeps going and that carcass keeps going. For the rest of the shift, that bacteria and feces is spread onto every other piece of meat that his knife touches, every machine that the carcass touches, and every other piece of meat that touches those machines. That meat is not discarded, it is sold. Sometimes it is withdrawn from the market, but only after people have been sickened and that sickness is tracked back to that meat. Most of the meat has already been placed into the hands and bellies of the consumers, so this recall is not an effective means of preventing contamination.
Generally, meat is not contaminated during the thawing process, or from sitting on a counter in a kitchen as you say it is. The problem is that bacteria in a cow's intestines is in and on our meat: there is shit in the meat. That's the problem.
First, fresh meat is unlikely to contain food-bourne illnesses if handled properly; after all the animal was alive and not dying of salmonilla not too long ago.
Not true. You can count on pork to contain trichinella. Also, you can count on the outside of chicken to be contaminated with salmonella, and E. coli will surely be found on the outside of steak and on the inside of ground beef. This is a fact of life now because of the methods used by meatpackers. If you buy your meat from anyone but a skilled independent butcher (a vanishing trade), not from your grocery store or not slaughtered or processed in a meatpacking plant, your meat will be dangerous to you uncooked.
Second, most food-bourne illnesses that you get from raw food are non-lethal unless you are unhealthy for other reasons.
Non-lethal cramping, diarrhea, are vomiting are fine with me! Where do I sign up?
Our tastes have dictate that we cook meat; texture, flavor and temperature are enhanced by many of our tried and trued cooking methods. We have come to like cooked foods better, but not because raw (or rare) meats will kill you. The current problem that the grandparent post complains about doesn't have to do with cooking the meat, but cooking the bacteria on the meat and the parasites in the meat. Meats are now overcooked (to the tastes of some) to make sure that we are not being served bacteria.
Where do these hazards come from? Some have always been there, like trichinosis in pigs. Some are new, like the increasing amount of E. coli on our beef. Why are we getting more bacteria on our beef? Modern slaughterhouses run their line speeds at rates that are too fast for the meat packers to assure that they aren't cutting into the intestines of the cows. Every time they do so, more bacteria enters our beef supply
Why not just walk up to a cow and take a bite out of their shoulder? It amounts to the same thing.
Actually, it's worse than that. Eating uncooked hamburger is the same as walking up to a cow and taking a big bite out of its rectum. Yes you get some meat, but you also get some "organ meat" and a whole raft of E. coli. Yum!
But what about all the companies that have invested to put WiFi where it is? Is it fair for the cities to decide that it should be free and drive them out of business?
Sure. The "cities" are made up of citizens. They all have priorities. If they collectively decide to fund a "free" wifi system, then they have decided that they would rather do it themselves than pay a private firm. Just because a company has "invested" in an infrastructure, that does not mean that they have a god-given right to profit from their investments. An investment is a risk and it is not the city's role to make sure that every investor hits jackpot every time.
Besides, nobody (I don't think) is looking to outlaw companies that would like to offer wifi service. There remain opportunities for them to run profitable businesses by beating the municipal wifi in areas other than price (service, coverage, speed, etc). If the other wifi providers are driven out of business, that means they had nothing special to offer the marketplace.
How is this different than Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer to drive Netscape out of business?
In a few ways.
1. Intent: The city has no interest, or capability, to suppress or co-opt the growth of wifi. If the system becomes stagnant, there are fewer barriers to alternate service providers. Ultimately, voting in a new set of city administrators would solve the problem. The Microsoft browser case was much different. Can you vote in a new board for Microsoft?
2. Bundling: Your use of municipal roads and water does not predispose you to using municipal wifi. You can have water delivered to your house by private contract, as you should have a choice in private or public wifi. With Windows and Internet Explorer, this was company using its success in one market segment to leverage itself into an advantage in another segment.
3. Externalities: Funny you mention spyware. We have all suffered because of the stagnation of browser market because of the bundling of operating system and web browser. How does this apply to wifi? Will municipal wifi cause more potholes? I don't understand your argument.
Corporations looking to protect their interests aren't evil.
I agree. But the corporations exerting power to set public policy that ordinary citizen do not have is disgusting to many people here. Corporations that look to protect their profits at the expense of the citizenry is hardly ethical.
Besides, I think the real profits are made in the content, not the connection. Free and ubiquitous wifi will be a boon to content providers in the way cable tv has been. Like it or not, our culture desires fat, free, and dense connections: our roads, our internet, our tv networks are all examples. Why not the airwaves too?
If the cities are going to drive the inovative hotspot providers out of business what incentive is there for the next innovation?
I think you answered your own question. The changing market will still allow entrepreneurs to innovate. Wifi is cool and all, but there should be more exciting things on the horizon. If cities reduce the opportunities for easy profits (pick the low hanging fruits), it will drive innovation into new technologies. I don't know about your city, but my county government just seemed to figure out how to connect to web. If cities are thinking wifi, it can't be cutting edge anymore.
I have a Leatherman Juice C2 that I picked up to replace a lost Swiss Army knife. I've had it for two years now and find myself carrying it around more than I had carried my knife.
pros: * red color (I would lose it otherwise) * the the assist makes the corkscrew easier to use that any I have used elsewhere * high quality (same as any Leatherman or Gerber) * good looks * not too bulky or heavy (fits in a pocket)
cons: * badly need a locking blade. The shape of the handle and blade make it especially not obvious which side it sharp. I have cut my thumb twice by putting my bracing my thumb on the sharp side and trying to cut with the dull side. I think this is a fatal flaw with the shape of the Juice line * Mine does not have a lanyard attachment. Leatherman has fixed this in newer models. * If I had to buy it again, I'd get something with scissors.
That may be so, but they'd compete for the limited resources (space, water, nutrients) with the bacteria that are already there. And the bacteria that survive there are specially adapted to that environment.
A martian bacterium would have all sorts of adaptations that allow it to live in its Martian environment. It would have to make special proteins and lipids for its cell wall, for example, to protect it on Mars that wouldn't be needed in your gut. All of these extra capabilities would put it at a competitive disadvantage against the existing bacteria in your gut. Because they can't be just "turned off", they would cost the bacteria in efficiency at every stage in its lifecycle. Think of it as genetic baggage slowing it down.
So I say the hypothetical bacteria trying to give you Martian's Revenge wouldn't stand a chance against your natural bacterial flora in your intestines.
During the 2000 presidential election ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors.
I don't believe that this is entirely correct. According to Palast's book there were many scrubbed felons that had their voting rights reinstated either by Florida or another state where they committed their felony. This fact was conveniently ignored when the scrub list was created.
I'd love to see some citations concerning some of the other allegations, but this post, modded informative, is nothing more than cut-n-paste .
Please cite your sources if you would like to maintain any respectability.
This is a great time to hunker down and read Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit."
This fellow James Lee is the Jackson Pollock of bullshit artists. I can see how this statement cound get the parent's goat: "Lee said law enforcement officials have so far advised the firm that only Californians need to be notified."
Of course, because California is the only state that requires notification. Duh.
You read his statements and they stick out like a sore thumb, in opposition to the universe as you know it. You wonder if he is either incompetent or lying. But it's really neither, he bullshitting you. This is what Frankfurt says:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Along the same lines, there is a remarkable amount of drug abuse in universities by whose who would like an advantage over their peers. Beside the joke that grad students use more meth than bikers, the ADD/ADHD (Adderall, Ritalin) drugs are gaining in popularity as they help with concentration and fatigue:
Elizabeth, 17, a high-school senior in the Washington area, credits Adderall with helping her post her best-ever score on the March SAT. "Why work harder to get a 1260 when you can take something . . . ?" Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Nov 8, 2004. pg. A.1
The loops, at least in my area, will respond to a bicycle, but you have to really work at it.
You have to pull up to the loop and lay your bike down close to horizontal where the cable is laid into the road. If you ride an aluminum or carbon fiber bike, the steel in the cranks and chain can be enough to get it to turn for you. Sometimes, even with a steel frame, you have to completely dismount and wave your bike around horizontally at the cables.
It works, but it's not the best solution to riding through intersections safely. And if you ride a recumbent you may be SOL. If you are carrying a loaded panniers it is no fun at all.
a simple promise won't really hold much water in court.
Bah! Not according to contract law in the US...
Have a look here:
A contract is any promise or set of promises made by one party to another for the breach of which the law provides a remedy. The promise or promises may be express (either written or oral) or may be implied from circumstances.
and here:
Contrary to common wisdom, an informal exchange of promises can still be binding and legally as valid as a written contract.
An oral promise can be just as legally binding as any written agreement.
and they make their employees work when sick. super
This is completely off topic, but I'll jump in with two feet... (I write as a former Starbucks partner with two years of experience from the bottom up to middle management)
Fortune Magazine consistently rates Starbucks as one of America's top 100 employers. There is a reason; they offer excellent benefits, reasonable compensation, and a good working environment. On paper, if you look at the training programs and advancement opportunities within the company, it looks fantastic from the outside. Specifically, there are company (and health code) regulations that forbid sick people from working.
However, these do no good within a company with an entrenched corporate culture that encourages and rewards dishonesty, bullying, cheating, and backstabbing. Unwritten rules always trump written policies making the job a joyless hell for some.
Consider this scenario: you work at Starbucks part time, about 20 hours a week. This is the cut-off point for heath converage (a quite generous plan); partner must maintain 20 hrs/week to be eligible for this coverage. Sick leave is not available for hourly employees. So if you are sick you face the tough choice of working sick or losing your health coverage. The kicker is that managers are trained (in the informal wink and grin style) to keep many employees' hours close to this level and use this leverage to minimize employees calling in and disrupting the business. It's a devious crock but nobody has been forced to work while ill.
I think Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do." With that in mind, think of your body as a time-lapse mirror of your activities, a footprint of your lifestyle. If you want to change that, it will require a commitment to change your daily habits. Unless you are under 21, there is no easy way to lose weight.
Personally, I've dropped from 235 to 165 lbs (106 to 61 kg) in the past 11 months. My girth broke three chairs in a month; out of that frustration I decided to take drastic steps. My program:
No meat. I am not a vegetarian, they belong to some strange club with which I do not affiliate myself. But I do not eat anything with eyes: no meat at all. Dropping meat from my diet has eliminated a great deal of the food that I was turning to for comfort eating. Further, it has forced me to evaluate my eating habits thoroughly. I don't stick anything in my mouth without thinking about its contents. This habit has eliminated the junk food quotient.
Exercise. I started walking in the evenings and hiking on the weekends. In one month, I had built the stamina to jog a mile. In another month I was able to jog two. Now I run three miles, four nights a week. Besides the improved muscle tone, I benefit from better flexibility from the pre-run stretching. The exercise used to be a chore, now it is a treat I indulge in after a good day of work.
Find what works for you. Have no regrets. Stop letting your bad habits bring you down.
The dramatic bottom of the list for years of healthy life for babies born in 1999: Sierra Leona, 25.9; Niger, 29.1; Malawi, 29.4; Zambia, 30.3; Botswana, 32.3; Uganda, 32.7; Rwanda, 32.8; Zimbabwe, 32.9; Mali, 33.1; and Ethiopia, 33.5
No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
Please don't forget to include the 28 million currently sentenced to die by the WTO.
While capitalism may not be a sinking ship, it is failing to guard its own future. Capitalism is good at sharing its diseases with the poor nations, and not very good at sharing the cure. By aggressively defending intellectual property rights, capitalism is a snake swallowing its own tail.
Our number system, our mathematics, and our primes may not be universally understood. They may merely be a convenient convention that we have constructed to make some sense out of our surroundings.
To blockquote Robert Pirsig from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
[Astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and philosopher Jules Henri] Poincaré concluded that the axioms of geometry are conventions, our choice among all possible conventions is guided by experimental facts, but it remains free and is limited only by the necessity of avoiding all contradiction. Thus it is that the postulates can remain rigorously true even though the experimental laws that have determined their adoption are only approximative. The axioms of geometry, in other words, are merely disguised definitions....Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.... Our concepts of space and time are also definitions, selected on the basis of their convenience in handling the facts.
Sentient beings on another planet may have other constructs that work just as well for them, and are as rigorously true as ours -- only more convenient for their circumstances. Imagine how a two dimensional critter has a different idea of space than a three dimensional critter. Neither is wrong or right, only less or more useful to the beholder.
Perceptual differences will result in different interpretations of truth. One system's prime may be another system's non-prime.
Slashdot Mirror
How did this get modded up as insightful? Naysaying is one thing, but wholly incorrect naysaying is anything but insightful.
* As a whole, people do not get as sick as in previous generations. The constant fuss over cleanliness reduces the general health of the immune system because of its lack of exposure to many diseases.
This is as silly a statement as "I do not take as many showers as most people, so my water is not as wet." The immune system works differently than how your muscles do, it does not function in a "use it or lose it" manner. When you are exposed to an antigen, you develop an acquired immune response to it allowing you to fight it faster in future exposures. This is not an issue with the avian flu because it is different from the other flu viruses that are, or have recently been, circulating through human populations (nobody has acquired immunity except for the people who have been infected and have lived). Whether or not people have been exposed to other germs will not change the immune response to a new flu virus. Additionally, during the 1918 flu those with the healthiest immune systems (people in their 20's and 30's) were more likely to die from flu infection (google "cytokine storm" to find out more). So your trite generalization does not apply to this situation.
* Vitamin deficiencies are not as rare as one might think; while scurvy is no longer common, most people in the civilized world consume processed foods, which generally lack vital nutrients. As such, their body mass is maintained or expanded, but the gains made in nutritional science have not, as a whole, trickled down very far into the general population.
You said it right there: "Scurvy is no longer common." Guess what, rickets isn't either. Vitamin deficiency diseases in the "civilized world" are not common. Making generalization about the quality of processed foods does not change that fact. Also, the terms "vitamin" and "nutrient" cannot be used interchangeably as they do not mean the same thing.
* Palliative diseases are of little use against a virus that causes tissue death in the lungs, encephalitis, and destruction of tissue membranes due to necrosis and apoptosis. H5N1 appears to cause a broad-spectrum attack on the human body in ways that aren't helped by rehydration or salt balance.
This statement is sheer nonsense. What is a palliative disease? I think you meant palliative treatments . Nobody expects "rehydration or salt balance" to affect the course of flu infection; the danger of highly virulent flu strains comes from hemorrhaging of alveoli tissues which causes anoxia. Yes, the flu causes vomiting and diarrhea but that's not what does you in. You might have confused the flu for cholera, which is treated with hydration and restoration of salts and sugars.
* The vast majority of people may live in their own bedrooms, but are more likely to congregate in large, relatively cramped areas for work, school (especially school!), and purchasing.
That's nothing new, people are social animals and our working, learning, entertainment, and shopping environments have always been crowded. But like the grandparent post said, what has changed is that our homes and hospitals are no longer as cramped as they once were. Some people think that this will reduce virulence of future pandemic flu strains because (I can't find a link now, but a recent article in Science theorized that the 1918 strain was particularly lethal because it had such an easy time with transmission in the trenches and hospitals of WWI in Europe. It falls in line with the "sick bird can fly, dead bird can't" reasoning that explains why highly virulent diseases like Ebola are not very transmissible and vice versa.)
I have
Did you read the original question or comments?
The article specifically asks about grading tests, with no mention homework:
I find myself looking at handwritten tests and thinking 'there's gotta be a better way...'
Then tktk writes:
Collect the tests
...
And I respond:
Because test scores make up a large part of any final grade, sharing these results with other students is probably a no-no.
Then you write:
I fail to see how peer-graded homework that isn't handed in constitutes part of a student's "record."
That's super; I never suggested that there could be a problem with homework. I do think that peer-grading of exams is questionable, specifically I mentioned that it could be a violation of the students' rights.
Besides concerns about cheating, that practice is likely a violation of the student's right to privacy. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the release of any information from a student's education record. Because test scores make up a large part of any final grade, sharing these results with other students is probably a no-no.
This happened all the time in my high school.
Yeah, high school is a good place to stomp all over kid's rights. Somebody has to put them in their place...
Metafilter carried a pretty fun discussion on this recently. This Scientific American article (pdf) by Robert Sapolsky is a good introduction to parasite brain control.
Site your source brother, lest you be accused of plagarism.
This seems to be a problem for you.
Do you include so much creative spelling in your posts to foil the quick google search used to detect your liberal borrowing of the work of others?
I stand corrected on Trichinella, thanks for the information. I did take note of the "If handled properly" qualifier in the original post. I didn't bother to respond to it because I agree with you that doing it all yourself, from field to plate, would be ideal way to make sure it is done correctly. But this is an unusual case for food preparation now. With some exceptions (sportsmen in particular), there is a prevailing desire in our culture for this work to be done by someone else. My point is that you currently can't trust that someone else to do it well enough to allow you to get away with eating raw hamburger meat.
Ethics are an important factor and I agree that there should be consistency between people's ethical feelings on killing animals and their willingness to consume their flesh. Time, facilities, expertise, and interest are also limiting factors. Not everyone can raise chickens and pigs at home or have the ability to hunt their own meat due to these factors.
I replied to you elsewhere so this post acts to clarify the part of the picture you are missing.
Imagine the inside of a meatpacking plant (and don't take my word for it, visit one some day): it's a factory where an animal enters on one side and food products exit on the other. Like any other modern factory it works as an assembly line, but in this case it can be better called a disassembly line. An 800lb animal turns into 800 1lb cuts of meat as it passes through a series of sharp objects. Because there is no standard cow (they are all different sizes) almost all of the sharp objects are large knives held by people. These people stay in the same spot on the disassembly line and make the same cut over and over on all the carcasses that pass by them. The working conditions are pretty horrid: it is very loud, you are working in close quarters with machines that will rip your arms off and other people wielding large knives, hunks of meat are swinging by you, the floor is slick with all sorts of fluids, and it is pretty chilly in there. To keep costs down and profits up, the assembly line runs dangerously fast and with almost no oversight from any internal or external safety agency. These workers are also unskilled labor, usually migrants from Central America (in US plants).
Now imagine what happens when one of the guys with a knife makes an imperfect cut and accidentally slices into the intestines of the carcass. He does not have a STOP button to stop the line so he can clean his knife and address the feces and bacteria leaking out onto the carcass. He just keeps going and that carcass keeps going. For the rest of the shift, that bacteria and feces is spread onto every other piece of meat that his knife touches, every machine that the carcass touches, and every other piece of meat that touches those machines. That meat is not discarded, it is sold. Sometimes it is withdrawn from the market, but only after people have been sickened and that sickness is tracked back to that meat. Most of the meat has already been placed into the hands and bellies of the consumers, so this recall is not an effective means of preventing contamination.
Generally, meat is not contaminated during the thawing process, or from sitting on a counter in a kitchen as you say it is. The problem is that bacteria in a cow's intestines is in and on our meat: there is shit in the meat. That's the problem.
First, fresh meat is unlikely to contain food-bourne illnesses if handled properly; after all the animal was alive and not dying of salmonilla not too long ago.
Not true. You can count on pork to contain trichinella. Also, you can count on the outside of chicken to be contaminated with salmonella, and E. coli will surely be found on the outside of steak and on the inside of ground beef. This is a fact of life now because of the methods used by meatpackers. If you buy your meat from anyone but a skilled independent butcher (a vanishing trade), not from your grocery store or not slaughtered or processed in a meatpacking plant, your meat will be dangerous to you uncooked.
Second, most food-bourne illnesses that you get from raw food are non-lethal unless you are unhealthy for other reasons.
Non-lethal cramping, diarrhea, are vomiting are fine with me! Where do I sign up?
Our tastes have dictate that we cook meat; texture, flavor and temperature are enhanced by many of our tried and trued cooking methods. We have come to like cooked foods better, but not because raw (or rare) meats will kill you. The current problem that the grandparent post complains about doesn't have to do with cooking the meat, but cooking the bacteria on the meat and the parasites in the meat. Meats are now overcooked (to the tastes of some) to make sure that we are not being served bacteria.
Where do these hazards come from? Some have always been there, like trichinosis in pigs. Some are new, like the increasing amount of E. coli on our beef. Why are we getting more bacteria on our beef? Modern slaughterhouses run their line speeds at rates that are too fast for the meat packers to assure that they aren't cutting into the intestines of the cows. Every time they do so, more bacteria enters our beef supply
Why not just walk up to a cow and take a bite out of their shoulder? It amounts to the same thing.
Actually, it's worse than that. Eating uncooked hamburger is the same as walking up to a cow and taking a big bite out of its rectum. Yes you get some meat, but you also get some "organ meat" and a whole raft of E. coli. Yum!
That may be true, but you'll never truly understand Algebra until you read it in its original Klingon.
But what about all the companies that have invested to put WiFi where it is? Is it fair for the cities to decide that it should be free and drive them out of business?
Sure. The "cities" are made up of citizens. They all have priorities. If they collectively decide to fund a "free" wifi system, then they have decided that they would rather do it themselves than pay a private firm. Just because a company has "invested" in an infrastructure, that does not mean that they have a god-given right to profit from their investments. An investment is a risk and it is not the city's role to make sure that every investor hits jackpot every time.
Besides, nobody (I don't think) is looking to outlaw companies that would like to offer wifi service. There remain opportunities for them to run profitable businesses by beating the municipal wifi in areas other than price (service, coverage, speed, etc). If the other wifi providers are driven out of business, that means they had nothing special to offer the marketplace.
How is this different than Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer to drive Netscape out of business?
In a few ways.
1. Intent: The city has no interest, or capability, to suppress or co-opt the growth of wifi. If the system becomes stagnant, there are fewer barriers to alternate service providers. Ultimately, voting in a new set of city administrators would solve the problem. The Microsoft browser case was much different. Can you vote in a new board for Microsoft?
2. Bundling: Your use of municipal roads and water does not predispose you to using municipal wifi. You can have water delivered to your house by private contract, as you should have a choice in private or public wifi. With Windows and Internet Explorer, this was company using its success in one market segment to leverage itself into an advantage in another segment.
3. Externalities: Funny you mention spyware. We have all suffered because of the stagnation of browser market because of the bundling of operating system and web browser. How does this apply to wifi? Will municipal wifi cause more potholes? I don't understand your argument.
Corporations looking to protect their interests aren't evil.
I agree. But the corporations exerting power to set public policy that ordinary citizen do not have is disgusting to many people here. Corporations that look to protect their profits at the expense of the citizenry is hardly ethical.
Besides, I think the real profits are made in the content, not the connection. Free and ubiquitous wifi will be a boon to content providers in the way cable tv has been. Like it or not, our culture desires fat, free, and dense connections: our roads, our internet, our tv networks are all examples. Why not the airwaves too?
If the cities are going to drive the inovative hotspot providers out of business what incentive is there for the next innovation?
I think you answered your own question. The changing market will still allow entrepreneurs to innovate. Wifi is cool and all, but there should be more exciting things on the horizon. If cities reduce the opportunities for easy profits (pick the low hanging fruits), it will drive innovation into new technologies. I don't know about your city, but my county government just seemed to figure out how to connect to web. If cities are thinking wifi, it can't be cutting edge anymore.
I have a Leatherman Juice C2 that I picked up to replace a lost Swiss Army knife. I've had it for two years now and find myself carrying it around more than I had carried my knife.
pros:
* red color (I would lose it otherwise)
* the the assist makes the corkscrew easier to use that any I have used elsewhere
* high quality (same as any Leatherman or Gerber)
* good looks
* not too bulky or heavy (fits in a pocket)
cons:
* badly need a locking blade. The shape of the handle and blade make it especially not obvious which side it sharp. I have cut my thumb twice by putting my bracing my thumb on the sharp side and trying to cut with the dull side. I think this is a fatal flaw with the shape of the Juice line
* Mine does not have a lanyard attachment. Leatherman has fixed this in newer models.
* If I had to buy it again, I'd get something with scissors.
That may be so, but they'd compete for the limited resources (space, water, nutrients) with the bacteria that are already there. And the bacteria that survive there are specially adapted to that environment.
A martian bacterium would have all sorts of adaptations that allow it to live in its Martian environment. It would have to make special proteins and lipids for its cell wall, for example, to protect it on Mars that wouldn't be needed in your gut. All of these extra capabilities would put it at a competitive disadvantage against the existing bacteria in your gut. Because they can't be just "turned off", they would cost the bacteria in efficiency at every stage in its lifecycle. Think of it as genetic baggage slowing it down.
So I say the hypothetical bacteria trying to give you Martian's Revenge wouldn't stand a chance against your natural bacterial flora in your intestines.
In addition I found a couple that I am going to start using such as portage-sharp.
From the portage-sharp project page on sourceforge:
Gotta love all those good intention projects on SourceForge.net
During the 2000 presidential election ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors.
I don't believe that this is entirely correct. According to Palast's book there were many scrubbed felons that had their voting rights reinstated either by Florida or another state where they committed their felony. This fact was conveniently ignored when the scrub list was created.
I'd love to see some citations concerning some of the other allegations, but this post, modded informative, is nothing more than cut-n-paste .
Please cite your sources if you would like to maintain any respectability.
This is a great time to hunker down and read Harry Frankfurt's essay "On Bullshit."
This fellow James Lee is the Jackson Pollock of bullshit artists. I can see how this statement cound get the parent's goat: "Lee said law enforcement officials have so far advised the firm that only Californians need to be notified."
Of course, because California is the only state that requires notification. Duh.
You read his statements and they stick out like a sore thumb, in opposition to the universe as you know it. You wonder if he is either incompetent or lying. But it's really neither, he bullshitting you. This is what Frankfurt says:
Say it after me: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
HIPAA.
Not HIPPA.
By the way, the questions clearly states that the interested party is a medical doctor in a hospital in Europe. HIPAA does not apply, hobgoblin.
Along the same lines, there is a remarkable amount of drug abuse in universities by whose who would like an advantage over their peers. Beside the joke that grad students use more meth than bikers, the ADD/ADHD (Adderall, Ritalin) drugs are gaining in popularity as they help with concentration and fatigue:
Indeed.
The loops, at least in my area, will respond to a bicycle, but you have to really work at it.
You have to pull up to the loop and lay your bike down close to horizontal where the cable is laid into the road. If you ride an aluminum or carbon fiber bike, the steel in the cranks and chain can be enough to get it to turn for you. Sometimes, even with a steel frame, you have to completely dismount and wave your bike around horizontally at the cables.
It works, but it's not the best solution to riding through intersections safely. And if you ride a recumbent you may be SOL. If you are carrying a loaded panniers it is no fun at all.
a simple promise won't really hold much water in court.
Bah! Not according to contract law in the US...
Have a look here: A contract is any promise or set of promises made by one party to another for the breach of which the law provides a remedy. The promise or promises may be express (either written or oral) or may be implied from circumstances. and here: Contrary to common wisdom, an informal exchange of promises can still be binding and legally as valid as a written contract.An oral promise can be just as legally binding as any written agreement.
This is completely off topic, but I'll jump in with two feet... (I write as a former Starbucks partner with two years of experience from the bottom up to middle management)
Fortune Magazine consistently rates Starbucks as one of America's top 100 employers. There is a reason; they offer excellent benefits, reasonable compensation, and a good working environment. On paper, if you look at the training programs and advancement opportunities within the company, it looks fantastic from the outside. Specifically, there are company (and health code) regulations that forbid sick people from working.
However, these do no good within a company with an entrenched corporate culture that encourages and rewards dishonesty, bullying, cheating, and backstabbing. Unwritten rules always trump written policies making the job a joyless hell for some.
Consider this scenario: you work at Starbucks part time, about 20 hours a week. This is the cut-off point for heath converage (a quite generous plan); partner must maintain 20 hrs/week to be eligible for this coverage. Sick leave is not available for hourly employees. So if you are sick you face the tough choice of working sick or losing your health coverage. The kicker is that managers are trained (in the informal wink and grin style) to keep many employees' hours close to this level and use this leverage to minimize employees calling in and disrupting the business. It's a devious crock but nobody has been forced to work while ill.
I mean 106 kg to 74 kg. What was I smoking?
I think Aristotle said, "We are what we repeatedly do." With that in mind, think of your body as a time-lapse mirror of your activities, a footprint of your lifestyle. If you want to change that, it will require a commitment to change your daily habits. Unless you are under 21, there is no easy way to lose weight.
Personally, I've dropped from 235 to 165 lbs (106 to 61 kg) in the past 11 months. My girth broke three chairs in a month; out of that frustration I decided to take drastic steps. My program:
Find what works for you. Have no regrets. Stop letting your bad habits bring you down.
[Life expectancy] has increased from 42 to 49 in sub Saharan Africa
What planet do you live on? Life expectancy is falling like a stone in sub-Saharan Africa. A half century of progress has been erased by HIV/AIDS.
No other century in history was as good for the human race as the 20th, despite the efforts of Hitler (6 million Jews), Stalin (20 million Ukrainians and rural Russians) and Mao (30 million)
Please don't forget to include the 28 million currently sentenced to die by the WTO.
While capitalism may not be a sinking ship, it is failing to guard its own future. Capitalism is good at sharing its diseases with the poor nations, and not very good at sharing the cure. By aggressively defending intellectual property rights, capitalism is a snake swallowing its own tail.
Our number system, our mathematics, and our primes may not be universally understood. They may merely be a convenient convention that we have constructed to make some sense out of our surroundings.
To blockquote Robert Pirsig from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
Sentient beings on another planet may have other constructs that work just as well for them, and are as rigorously true as ours -- only more convenient for their circumstances. Imagine how a two dimensional critter has a different idea of space than a three dimensional critter. Neither is wrong or right, only less or more useful to the beholder.
Perceptual differences will result in different interpretations of truth. One system's prime may be another system's non-prime.