Isis uses Toyota trucks to go places. If Isis didn't have Toyota trucks, they'd have to walk everywhere and would not have been able to grow so quickly.
My point was that simplicity is not always better. Sometimes it's nice to have a bit of complexity if it leads to convenience. Like having your AC or heater turn itself off when it gets to a desired temperature, or being able to control your thermostat from your phone when you aren't home.
Phone updates take several minutes to complete. Given how much I use my phone this would be pretty annoying if it happened at an inconvenient time. I don't use my nest very often. I would find constant reminders of new updates being available to be much more annoying than automatic updates.
I am not highly invested in the software that runs on my nest as long as it works a high percentage of the time.
It would be great if every manufacturer could make their software bug free from day 1, but as a software engineer, I know that that's basically impossible.
So for every device you have some choices. You can have no updates, optional updates with annoying reminders, or automatic updates. Just choose the risk/reward you want.
Even thermostats are pretty complicated. Why do you need all these fancy temperature sensors and automatic temperature control. Why not just have some buttons to turn the heater and A/C on and when the climate is good, turn them off?
And when there is a software bug on a non-connected device, there is no practical way to fix it.
Are regular dumb thermostats more reliable? Sure. But I am willing to sacrifice a little reliability if it means I can turn on the heat to my house from my phone an hour before I get home.
Really? Because your "refutation" of my faulty assumptions includes repeating things that I already said. Which to me says that you either can't read, or you have problems with logic.
Furthermore, if you think the worst performing schools in the US are the ones getting the most money, you are out of your fucking mind. You may as well claim that it's poor people that are driving all the Ferraris.
Sure vaccines *can* cause harm. The world is a dangerous place, and we can't foresee all eventualities. The best we can do is make rational choices and good compromises.
I think as a matter of public policy the current compromise between safety and freedom is a pretty good one. You are not forced to get immunized. If you can not get immunized for medical reasons, we give you a free pass, and let you benefit from herd immunity. If you simply don't want to get immunized, then you get a little bit ostracized.
When someone actually has a highly dangerous and infectious disease, pretty much everyone is on board with stripping this persons freedom to travel to highly populated areas. Not being immunized is a less severe risk with a less severe restriction.
As long as the regulations are applied fairly, I don't see why people should have a problem with it, unless they simply don't accept the validity of vaccines (in which case there is not much that can be done to reason with those people anyway).
This is in contrast to people like Typhoid Mary who may have indeed infected lots of people, but as it turns out she was mostly just a scapegoat where the authorities could point to her detention as evidence of their actions to prevent the spread of infectious disease, while lots of other similarly infected yet less infamous people were basically ignored.
Taking people's stuff through the threat of force and then giving it back with conditions certainly sounds like "forcing" people to me.
It's absolutely force. It's forcibly taking property. It's not forcibly immunizing people. For one thing, the property is taken regardless of whether the child is given immunizations or attends the public schools.
No, vouchers mostly help lower income people, who finally get a choice about schools. A "discount" on high school doesn't make a big difference to wealthy people.
It doesn't help poor people who can't afford to pay for private school even with the vouchers. Those people will be be stuck in a public school with even less funding as wealthier people flee to private schools. And as I said. I am not against vouchers. This is just the reality of what happens.
About half of the schools in countries like Germany don't even attempt to prepare students for college or university; did you "see" any such schools?
Yeah, my friend teaches at one. The kids attending it are mostly from children of poor immigrants. These teachers are doing the best they can. One key difference is that my friend actually gets paid more to work in a troubled school, while in America we pay teachers in low income schools less, furthering the divide.
As it is in Europe. What matters is, in fact, not the amount of money available to schools, but the demographics of students and parents.
The difference being that in the US and Europe seems to be an honest attempt at remedying the situation rather than simply being complacent with the vast difference in quality of education for low and high income students.
No, the "force" is in the taxation itself, something lower income people are disproportionately subjected to.
Yes the taxes are certainly forced. But this is not the same as being forced to get immunizations.
Correct. I want curricula to be determined by the market. That is, there should be a wide range of schools offering a wide range of educational options, and parents vote with their dollars.
There are. They just aren't free. And I'm not even opposed to vouchers. All I am saying is that it doesn't solve the larger problem of people paying for schools they don't use. It only solves this problem for a small subset of people who already have kids but can;t go to public school for whatever reason. I thoink if anything vouchers probably help wealthy people most of all. They are the people who would be sending their kids to private school anyway, but with vouchers they can get a big discount.
US public schools are pretty decent, and US private schools are excellent. And for all its problems, the US is still culturally and socially way ahead of Europe, although unfortunately, European political mistakes are gradually making inroads in the US. The US should return to its more classically liberal tradition of individualism and personal responsibility, instead of trying to have government "fix" society.
Europe is a big place. There is no doubt a lot of diversity in European schools, just like there is a lot of diversity in American schools. Most of the schools I've seen in Europe were way better than the schools I attended in early life (LAUSD). It was only until my parents moved to a wealthy neighborhood that schools became much better.
We certainly have some very good public schools, and definitely some good private schools, especially when you get to the university level, but this is not the whole story. There are lots of people stuck in substandard schools in poor communities. The difference in quality between affluent schools and low income schools is immense.
Which terrorists will this stop? The cats out of the bag on strong encryption. You can force every hardware manufacturer to sell machines pre-installed with weak encryption, and nothing stops terrorists (or anybody) from replacing this software with strong encryption. You can't stop the spread of strong encryption because it's math.
The best you can hope for is to mandate that every citizen allow you to read their personal data, and hope that the ones that refuse are the terrorists.
And even if that somehow magically works, you can be congratulated for turning a first world country into a shithole just like where terrorists come from, and you can start breeding homegrown terrorists angry at the totalitarian regimes they are oppressed by.
Another problem is that we can;t read minds yet. Terrorists could be holding all sorts of secrets that they haven't stored in digital files or on paper. Maybe we should pass a law mandating that brains come with weak encryption and band whispering.
It would be "the same issue" if we were talking about a small expense. But schooling is major and mandatory. Lower income families do not have an economic choice: they must send their kids to public school, no matter what.
Lower income people pay lower taxes from having dependents. Paying for the local schools is a requirement for everyone regardless of whether they use the schools.
I have been paying for public schools for the past 11 years. I have a 1 year old and I won't be able to start using public schools for another 4 years. That's even if we deem the schools in our area to be good enough quality. Otherwise we are sending my daughter to private school in which case we will not be getting any of the benefit of public schools. Believe me, this issue of paying for public schools without using them affects way more people than just people who don;t want to get immunizations.
Saying that poor people who forced to get immunized because they must send their kids to public schools, is like saying that I am forced to use public transportation because I can't afford a car. That's not what force is. That's still well within the realm of choices. Everyone must make choices, and being poor means making some harder choices.
I think it's actually good that this is a hard choice. Maybe it will mean that some idiot parents will actually decide to immunize their kids which may prevent them from getting a horrible disease or giving someone else a horrible disease. The kids don't get a say, but I'm sure the countless kids saved by vaccines every year appreciate that their parents made the right choice when they grow up, or more likely that they don't even have to think about diseases that they avoided.
All of them: curricula are politically determined, through legislatures and school boards.
I thought you were using "politically" in the colloquial sense. You want the curricula to be determined non-politically (i.e. without the influence of the citizenry) ?
I come from one of those countries whose public schools are supposedly very good; they aren't.
Which country is that? Sweden?
Even if you look at something like the PISA study, the US is just fairly average, with the differences between countries not being all that large. European schools have the same kinds of problems that US schools do. When they work a little better (e.g., in Finland), it's due to social and cultural factors.
I don't think anyone disagrees that social factors and cultural factors effect school performance. But it is also true that education affects social and cultural factors. They effect each other. Part of the problem with improving schools is that you need a smarter population to solve problems of society properly, and you don't get that without a good education system.
People could just as easily say the converse. We can't fix these social and cultural problems because the education system is broken.
Law enforcement doesn't have to show up with vaccines on your doorstep in order to coerce you; they can arrest you, or take your stuff, or limit your freedom of movement, or whatever until you "choose" to get vaccinated. Those approaches are just as coercive as if they showed up with vaccines at your house.
The way government *forces* you to do something is with guns. They have other tools like fines and prison, but should you refuse to pay fines or report to prison, the guys with guns show up to your house. Simply preventing you from using some public services like public schools is not coercion. It's just a normal requirement like any other.
Whether people who don't have any kids pay for the education of other people's kids, and how that education is delivered are two entirely separate issues.
It is the same issue as the issue of paying for public schools if you don;t vaccinate your children, because in both scenarios you are forced to pay for a service you aren't using. And the reasons for this situation are the same. It is because public schools are funded by property taxes and not, for example, tuition. Everyone who is paying property taxes is paying for schools they may or may not be using for whatever reason. It's not unique to opponents of vaccination. Vouchers only "fix" one aspect of this larger problem.
Regardless of where you stand on the first point, delivering education through a public school system with politically determined curricula and policies is increasingly failing.
What political determined curricula are you referring to?
I think American schools just suck even ignoring the effect of politics. We spend more money per capita than any country in the world on public schools and our schools are terrible. It's not that public schools in general are bad, there are many examples of countries who do public schools very well. We just don't seem capable of it at the moment.
The question isn't whether government scientists are right or wrong about any particular vaccine, it is whether the government should have the right to force people to inject stuff into their bodies.
That's not the question until law enforcement start showing up at your house with vaccines and guns.
Private schools can make that argument and require vaccinations to their hearts' content. Public schools, however, are bound by limits on governmental powers; for example, they can't advocate particular religions, and likewise, they shouldn't be able to impose vaccinations.
I don't see how these are the same at all. One would be a regulation on thought (i.e. religions are belief systems), the other is a regulation on public safety. If the government can prevent people from coming into government buildings with firearms, then they should be able to kids from going to schools if they are a public safety hazard due to lack of immunizations.
A compromise would be to move to a voucher system that allows kids who don't want to attend public schools to use the money to pay for private schools, but that is something progressives and their public sector union lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail.
Schools are paid for by property taxes. This is a horrible system in general. Vouchers don't fix this problem, because you are still paying for the schools if you have zero kids. Just like your taxes are paying for government buildings like courts that prohibit firearms even if you are an open carry proponent.
I understand that many healthcare operations consider some immunizations a condition of employment for workers in contact with patients. Certain workers who refused immunizations would be subject to reassignment, demotion, and/or termination.
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me if it is true, especially if you are working around immunocompromised patients.
That said, this is all in the realm of people being free to make choices, as opposed to being forced to get vaccines where your "choices" are to get a vaccine and fines/prison/bullet/etc.
OK I can see that. Mexico pays the American workers a salary for Chinese workers to do all the work. It will be a tough job to convince Mexico to pay for something they won't get, and to convince China to work without getting paid, but negotiating is what Trump is good at.
We will have a huge solid gold space station with a casino and hot chicks that aren't fat. We will make Chinese workers do the job, but the wages will go to American workers.
If you are talking about "kids being forced to get a vaccination as a per-requisite of attending public schools", then that's exactly what I said. If you are talking about "home schooled kids being forced to get vaccinated under penalty of their parents being fined or jailed", please provide a citation.
That quote doesn't say anything about the infection rate growing. It just says that 79 million people are infected, and that the infection rate is 14 million per year. In order to show that infections are growing, you have to show that the number of infected people or rate of infection per capita is going up over time.
Slashdot Mirror
Isis uses Toyota trucks to go places. If Isis didn't have Toyota trucks, they'd have to walk everywhere and would not have been able to grow so quickly.
I was being sarcastic.
My point was that simplicity is not always better. Sometimes it's nice to have a bit of complexity if it leads to convenience. Like having your AC or heater turn itself off when it gets to a desired temperature, or being able to control your thermostat from your phone when you aren't home.
Phone updates take several minutes to complete. Given how much I use my phone this would be pretty annoying if it happened at an inconvenient time. I don't use my nest very often. I would find constant reminders of new updates being available to be much more annoying than automatic updates.
I am not highly invested in the software that runs on my nest as long as it works a high percentage of the time.
It would be great if every manufacturer could make their software bug free from day 1, but as a software engineer, I know that that's basically impossible.
So for every device you have some choices. You can have no updates, optional updates with annoying reminders, or automatic updates. Just choose the risk/reward you want.
Yeah because it would be way better to have random python hackers or random java hackers making software...
Even thermostats are pretty complicated. Why do you need all these fancy temperature sensors and automatic temperature control. Why not just have some buttons to turn the heater and A/C on and when the climate is good, turn them off?
And when there is a software bug on a non-connected device, there is no practical way to fix it.
Are regular dumb thermostats more reliable? Sure. But I am willing to sacrifice a little reliability if it means I can turn on the heat to my house from my phone an hour before I get home.
Really? Because your "refutation" of my faulty assumptions includes repeating things that I already said. Which to me says that you either can't read, or you have problems with logic.
Furthermore, if you think the worst performing schools in the US are the ones getting the most money, you are out of your fucking mind. You may as well claim that it's poor people that are driving all the Ferraris.
Sure vaccines *can* cause harm. The world is a dangerous place, and we can't foresee all eventualities. The best we can do is make rational choices and good compromises.
I think as a matter of public policy the current compromise between safety and freedom is a pretty good one. You are not forced to get immunized. If you can not get immunized for medical reasons, we give you a free pass, and let you benefit from herd immunity. If you simply don't want to get immunized, then you get a little bit ostracized.
When someone actually has a highly dangerous and infectious disease, pretty much everyone is on board with stripping this persons freedom to travel to highly populated areas. Not being immunized is a less severe risk with a less severe restriction.
As long as the regulations are applied fairly, I don't see why people should have a problem with it, unless they simply don't accept the validity of vaccines (in which case there is not much that can be done to reason with those people anyway).
This is in contrast to people like Typhoid Mary who may have indeed infected lots of people, but as it turns out she was mostly just a scapegoat where the authorities could point to her detention as evidence of their actions to prevent the spread of infectious disease, while lots of other similarly infected yet less infamous people were basically ignored.
I think you need to pull your head out of your ass and read what I actually said.
You're replying to the wrong person. All I am arguing is that vouchers don't fix the "problem" of people paying for things they don't benefit from.
Taking people's stuff through the threat of force and then giving it back with conditions certainly sounds like "forcing" people to me.
It's absolutely force. It's forcibly taking property. It's not forcibly immunizing people. For one thing, the property is taken regardless of whether the child is given immunizations or attends the public schools.
No, vouchers mostly help lower income people, who finally get a choice about schools. A "discount" on high school doesn't make a big difference to wealthy people.
It doesn't help poor people who can't afford to pay for private school even with the vouchers. Those people will be be stuck in a public school with even less funding as wealthier people flee to private schools. And as I said. I am not against vouchers. This is just the reality of what happens.
About half of the schools in countries like Germany don't even attempt to prepare students for college or university; did you "see" any such schools?
Yeah, my friend teaches at one. The kids attending it are mostly from children of poor immigrants. These teachers are doing the best they can. One key difference is that my friend actually gets paid more to work in a troubled school, while in America we pay teachers in low income schools less, furthering the divide.
As it is in Europe. What matters is, in fact, not the amount of money available to schools, but the demographics of students and parents.
The difference being that in the US and Europe seems to be an honest attempt at remedying the situation rather than simply being complacent with the vast difference in quality of education for low and high income students.
No, the "force" is in the taxation itself, something lower income people are disproportionately subjected to.
Yes the taxes are certainly forced. But this is not the same as being forced to get immunizations.
Correct. I want curricula to be determined by the market. That is, there should be a wide range of schools offering a wide range of educational options, and parents vote with their dollars.
There are. They just aren't free. And I'm not even opposed to vouchers. All I am saying is that it doesn't solve the larger problem of people paying for schools they don't use. It only solves this problem for a small subset of people who already have kids but can;t go to public school for whatever reason. I thoink if anything vouchers probably help wealthy people most of all. They are the people who would be sending their kids to private school anyway, but with vouchers they can get a big discount.
US public schools are pretty decent, and US private schools are excellent. And for all its problems, the US is still culturally and socially way ahead of Europe, although unfortunately, European political mistakes are gradually making inroads in the US. The US should return to its more classically liberal tradition of individualism and personal responsibility, instead of trying to have government "fix" society.
Europe is a big place. There is no doubt a lot of diversity in European schools, just like there is a lot of diversity in American schools. Most of the schools I've seen in Europe were way better than the schools I attended in early life (LAUSD). It was only until my parents moved to a wealthy neighborhood that schools became much better.
We certainly have some very good public schools, and definitely some good private schools, especially when you get to the university level, but this is not the whole story. There are lots of people stuck in substandard schools in poor communities. The difference in quality between affluent schools and low income schools is immense.
But maybe we should pass a law protecting milk drinkers just in case. There are a lot of cops out there with nothing to do.
Which terrorists will this stop? The cats out of the bag on strong encryption. You can force every hardware manufacturer to sell machines pre-installed with weak encryption, and nothing stops terrorists (or anybody) from replacing this software with strong encryption. You can't stop the spread of strong encryption because it's math.
The best you can hope for is to mandate that every citizen allow you to read their personal data, and hope that the ones that refuse are the terrorists.
And even if that somehow magically works, you can be congratulated for turning a first world country into a shithole just like where terrorists come from, and you can start breeding homegrown terrorists angry at the totalitarian regimes they are oppressed by.
Another problem is that we can;t read minds yet. Terrorists could be holding all sorts of secrets that they haven't stored in digital files or on paper. Maybe we should pass a law mandating that brains come with weak encryption and band whispering.
And now grandparent doesn't exist, and parent is +5 informative in response to a nonexistent comment. This is bullshit.
I'm not even sure what we disagree on.
It would be "the same issue" if we were talking about a small expense. But schooling is major and mandatory. Lower income families do not have an economic choice: they must send their kids to public school, no matter what.
Lower income people pay lower taxes from having dependents. Paying for the local schools is a requirement for everyone regardless of whether they use the schools.
I have been paying for public schools for the past 11 years. I have a 1 year old and I won't be able to start using public schools for another 4 years. That's even if we deem the schools in our area to be good enough quality. Otherwise we are sending my daughter to private school in which case we will not be getting any of the benefit of public schools. Believe me, this issue of paying for public schools without using them affects way more people than just people who don;t want to get immunizations.
Saying that poor people who forced to get immunized because they must send their kids to public schools, is like saying that I am forced to use public transportation because I can't afford a car. That's not what force is. That's still well within the realm of choices. Everyone must make choices, and being poor means making some harder choices.
I think it's actually good that this is a hard choice. Maybe it will mean that some idiot parents will actually decide to immunize their kids which may prevent them from getting a horrible disease or giving someone else a horrible disease. The kids don't get a say, but I'm sure the countless kids saved by vaccines every year appreciate that their parents made the right choice when they grow up, or more likely that they don't even have to think about diseases that they avoided.
All of them: curricula are politically determined, through legislatures and school boards.
I thought you were using "politically" in the colloquial sense. You want the curricula to be determined non-politically (i.e. without the influence of the citizenry) ?
I come from one of those countries whose public schools are supposedly very good; they aren't.
Which country is that? Sweden?
Even if you look at something like the PISA study, the US is just fairly average, with the differences between countries not being all that large. European schools have the same kinds of problems that US schools do. When they work a little better (e.g., in Finland), it's due to social and cultural factors.
I don't think anyone disagrees that social factors and cultural factors effect school performance. But it is also true that education affects social and cultural factors. They effect each other. Part of the problem with improving schools is that you need a smarter population to solve problems of society properly, and you don't get that without a good education system.
People could just as easily say the converse. We can't fix these social and cultural problems because the education system is broken.
Law enforcement doesn't have to show up with vaccines on your doorstep in order to coerce you; they can arrest you, or take your stuff, or limit your freedom of movement, or whatever until you "choose" to get vaccinated. Those approaches are just as coercive as if they showed up with vaccines at your house.
The way government *forces* you to do something is with guns. They have other tools like fines and prison, but should you refuse to pay fines or report to prison, the guys with guns show up to your house. Simply preventing you from using some public services like public schools is not coercion. It's just a normal requirement like any other.
Whether people who don't have any kids pay for the education of other people's kids, and how that education is delivered are two entirely separate issues.
It is the same issue as the issue of paying for public schools if you don;t vaccinate your children, because in both scenarios you are forced to pay for a service you aren't using. And the reasons for this situation are the same. It is because public schools are funded by property taxes and not, for example, tuition. Everyone who is paying property taxes is paying for schools they may or may not be using for whatever reason. It's not unique to opponents of vaccination. Vouchers only "fix" one aspect of this larger problem.
Regardless of where you stand on the first point, delivering education through a public school system with politically determined curricula and policies is increasingly failing.
What political determined curricula are you referring to?
I think American schools just suck even ignoring the effect of politics. We spend more money per capita than any country in the world on public schools and our schools are terrible. It's not that public schools in general are bad, there are many examples of countries who do public schools very well. We just don't seem capable of it at the moment.
The question isn't whether government scientists are right or wrong about any particular vaccine, it is whether the government should have the right to force people to inject stuff into their bodies.
That's not the question until law enforcement start showing up at your house with vaccines and guns.
Private schools can make that argument and require vaccinations to their hearts' content. Public schools, however, are bound by limits on governmental powers; for example, they can't advocate particular religions, and likewise, they shouldn't be able to impose vaccinations.
I don't see how these are the same at all. One would be a regulation on thought (i.e. religions are belief systems), the other is a regulation on public safety. If the government can prevent people from coming into government buildings with firearms, then they should be able to kids from going to schools if they are a public safety hazard due to lack of immunizations.
A compromise would be to move to a voucher system that allows kids who don't want to attend public schools to use the money to pay for private schools, but that is something progressives and their public sector union lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail.
Schools are paid for by property taxes. This is a horrible system in general. Vouchers don't fix this problem, because you are still paying for the schools if you have zero kids. Just like your taxes are paying for government buildings like courts that prohibit firearms even if you are an open carry proponent.
I understand that many healthcare operations consider some immunizations a condition of employment for workers in contact with patients. Certain workers who refused immunizations would be subject to reassignment, demotion, and/or termination.
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me if it is true, especially if you are working around immunocompromised patients.
That said, this is all in the realm of people being free to make choices, as opposed to being forced to get vaccines where your "choices" are to get a vaccine and fines/prison/bullet/etc.
OK I can see that. Mexico pays the American workers a salary for Chinese workers to do all the work. It will be a tough job to convince Mexico to pay for something they won't get, and to convince China to work without getting paid, but negotiating is what Trump is good at.
We will have a huge solid gold space station with a casino and hot chicks that aren't fat. We will make Chinese workers do the job, but the wages will go to American workers.
If you are talking about "kids being forced to get a vaccination as a per-requisite of attending public schools", then that's exactly what I said. If you are talking about "home schooled kids being forced to get vaccinated under penalty of their parents being fined or jailed", please provide a citation.
violin playing.....
That quote doesn't say anything about the infection rate growing. It just says that 79 million people are infected, and that the infection rate is 14 million per year. In order to show that infections are growing, you have to show that the number of infected people or rate of infection per capita is going up over time.