Hmm. Apparently capitalist governments are even more effective at sinking funds into projects like that
Yes, because they end up having more money to spend.
Of course, for some inexplicable reason US didnt respond to Soviet challenge by leveraging the power of free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit.
The US leveraged the power of "free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit" by taxing it.
Funnily enough, Russians are now launching the lions share of commercial space payloads, whereas the recent SpaceX Falcon 9 first comsat launch was the first in years for US.
Funnily enough, private industry has little incentive competing with government services, in particular if private industry is heavily regulated. And for anything other than satellite launches, there simply hasn't been much incentive for private investment at all. The Soviet union is, of course, still just living off resources created on the back of peasants and workers during the Soviet era.
The moon landing may have been a good political stunt, but scientifically and economically, it was a huge waste of money.
The point of the X-Prize is to show that private space exploration is possible, i.e., that the costs have come down enough so that it makes sense for businesses to start engaging in space exploration, or that it has become cheap enough so that people can do it for fun.
The ability of space exploration by tax-payer funded government entities doesn't need to be established, it was established half a century ago. Communist nations tend to be even better at doing such things in the short run because they can redirect money more easily to such projects even if they don't make sense.
That Obama would condemn and stop being ambivalent, but I suppose letting them stew is enough.
Obama isn't "ambivalent" about the NSA or its programs: he is responsible for them and has for many years.
What you perceive as "ambivalence" is just his difficulty in figuring out how to blame Republicans or corporations for yet another one of his policy disasters.
The problem with that is that nothing that you enter on your phone or that's displayed on your phone is even remotely secure: your carrier, your phone vendor, various intelligence agencies, and police can all compromise your phone at the push of a button.
That's not what I propose nor what the FDA is doing. If someone tries to sell an automated system to tell people what those lumps and spots mean (particularly if they use the term "risk") you'd better believe I would demand enforcement of the existing laws that say that the seller must prove that their system works in order to sell it.
The problem is that you and the FDA define "working" as "high precision and recall", instead of simply a truthful disclosure of what the test result means. 23andMe is saying "here is the genetic marker, and there is one study that suggests that this marker may indicate...". The test works as advertised. But you think everybody else is illiterate and stupid and is going to make bad decisions, so you want to keep such results from them. And although people like you insist on "risk quantification" and perfection for everybody else, you never show that the stringent regulatory policies you advocate are effective or even necessary. Apply your own criteria to your policy advocacy.
I am truly stunned by this. A self-interpreted home-made CT scan is an unalloyed good?
The "good" is that the diagnostic equipment becomes so cheap that people can make it themselves. They can then decide for themselves whether to use it for good or for bad. People are smarter than you give them credit for: far more people will use it responsibly and benefit from it than people who will misuse it and harm themselves. The only people who would really suffer would be doctors and corporations, who see a lucrative source of revenue disappear.
There is a role for experts and there are some things that are dangerous enough that an expert's opinion should be required
You are deliberately obfuscating and confusing two very different situations: harm to others and harm to myself. Some sort of arbiter is required when person A does something that may directly harm person B; that's when we should require people to get involved based on criteria that we can agree on as a society. Since such positions are frequently responsible for abuse of power, we should also minimize such situations. But an expert's opinion should never be required, let alone their judgment or permission, for things I want to do to myself.
23andMe should be required to be clear and truthful about their results, but they obviously are. Offering an unreliable test with clear disclosure should not be grounds for banning a test.
Since this post is entitled "offensive arrogance", let me just ask if you really think that education and experience means nothing.
A used car salesman is an expert on cars and their faults. Does that mean you should trust him? Would you want to pass laws that let used car salesmen decide on your behalf which car to buy? Of course not. Yet, that's what you advocate for medicine.
you'd better believe I would demand enforcement of the existing laws that say that the seller must prove that their system works in order to sell it.
One can reasonably talk about disclosure requirements for services like 23andMe. But the restrictions you advocate oh services are nothing more than a handout to the medical and insurance industry. In the guise of worrying about consumer safety, you effectively advocate harmful corporatism and privacy intrusions. People like you are responsible for the spiraling health care costs and the inability to deliver good and effective health care to the poorest in our nation.
Are you at all worried about what people will do with their homemade CT scanners?
Are you being serious? No, of course I'm not worried, I think it would be great. How could you possibly think it wouldn't be great?
What's next? Are you going to try to pass laws against skin, testicle, and breast self-exams because people might be confused by the lumps and spots they might discover?
Perhaps doctors know a little bit about reacting to that kind of data (and the uncertainties in it) and making good decisions about it?
Some doctors do, others are dumber as dirt. Ultimately, the decision belongs to the patient, not the doctor, and the doctor's only job is to give advice if the patient wants it. On the other hand, if the patient discovers something about his body that concerns him, it's the doctor's job to look and explain.
That being said, omega3/6 fatty acid balance *is* important. Stick to grass-fed butter rather than corn fed cows.
Butter is 3% polyunsaturated fat, and maybe 1% omega-3 if you get grass-fed butter. So, to get the recommended 1-2g of omega-3's per day, you need to consume between 750 and 1500 calories of butter alone. Even if saturated fats don't concern you, that's not going to work for a diet. Other animal fats aren't much better.
You're simply wrong. Saturated fats aren't a problem, and have never been a problem.
What harms your arteries isn't what's stored, it's what gets transported, and that's predominantly what you eat.
Furthermore, on a modern diet, low omega-3 intake is a problem. If you eat more saturated fat, you necessarily eat less omega-3. What's stored in your fat cells has no bearing on that.
I'm sorry to hear about your problems. So you're really going through something acute right now. I wish you good luck with that and a quick recovery. It sounds like you don't have any kind of support or social network. If friends can't help, have you considered getting help from a church or similar organization?
Right. You burn fewer calories as you get older and less active. You need to eat less.
Yes, and how one accomplishes that is what diets are all about.
A normal, older sedentary person can force themselves to eat just enough pasta to fulfill their caloric requirements and then battle a hungry feeling and be miserable for hours. Sooner or later they will fail and fall off their diet.
Or they can eat the right foods and feel full after eating just enough calories. They won't feel miserable, and they won't fall off their diet.
I didn't suggest a low-meat or low protein diet. In fact, I didn't suggest a specific diet at all. I just listed a bunch of things serious dieters should try before starting to pop pills. Obese people usually get too much meat and too much fat along with it, and it's really hard to get all lean meat all the time; switching much of that meat to mix of fish, eggs, and soy is simple and has other benefits, one of which is that it's much easier to control your fat intake associated with the protein you get.
I stand by what I said: if you're obese and serious about dieting, cut the saturated fat; you're probably getting too much, and there are better fats. Saturated fats have no health benefits and are probably harmful even from vegetable sources. Since most people need to get more omega-3's and obese people are likely already at risk for CVD, the best thing to do is to pick vegetable oils as rich in omega-3's as possible. Use saturated fats only occasionally, for taste or stability.
So meat, dairy, lard, fish and cold pressed plant vegetables like olive, nut, and Avacado oils.
Cold pressed vegetable oils, avocados, and fish oils are (with a few exceptions) predominantly unsaturated fats. So it sounds like you mostly got the good kind of fat, you simply didn't realize what you were doing.
But unsaturated fats are mostly the byproduct of industrial processes requied heat and solvents. No thanks.
You're confusing unsaturated fats and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils; partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are really bad for you.
You're absolutely right: it's balancing calories in/out. Since you're not obese, your appetite control is working and your experience isn't relevant. People who actually are obese and trying to lose weight have a problem stopping to eat when they have already consumed enough calories. That is strongly influenced by the kinds of foods they eat. It happens frequently with starchy foods, foods containing lots of saturated fats, and meats, so any serious dieter should start by cutting those and see whether it helps.
If Elsevier's terms are heinously egregious, that just means the territory is wide open to a competitor with better terms. Why doesn't somebody take these bastards on and clean their clock via competition?
It takes time to establish a new, highly ranked journal because there are big network effects. In addition, the authors and editors of the journal are usually unpaid and not motivated by money, so you can't lure them away with more money; and many of the readers of the journal usually don't pay for the journal but "socialize" the cost, so they don't care that much about how much it costs.
All of that slows down replacing Elsevier with alternatives. But it is happening, faster in some disciplines than in others. Elsevier has crossed a line where people are simply too pissed off to continue living with it.
Spreading FUD like "fact is that around 40-60% of children did not survive to adulthood before vaccinations" is harmful to efforts to get people vaccinated. People like you cast all vaccination proponents in a bad light. Stick to the facts instead of trying to manipulate people through misrepresentations.
Whether you have a variant dopamine receptor is certainly a reasonable thing to include in a genetic testing package like 23andMe: even if current studies don't have clear results about what that means, there is a good chance that there will be meaningful associations in the future. If 23andMe only included those tests for which absolutely clearcut associations had been worked out, people would have to get retested constantly.
The company did what it should have done: it picked a large number of important markers and disclosed things correctly and properly.
Fortunately, this kind of FDA stupidity is not going to work long term: people are simply going to get their entire genomes sequenced, and there will be a huge number of free tools and web sites for searching for disease associations, ancestry, and relatives.
There are plenty of tools and sources that help you analyze the data. Long term, the FDA decision will simply mean that people who are skilled and/or rich enough to go abroad will get the benefit of this analysis, while everybody else will be screwed. Congratulations, FDA, for doing your part in increasing health disparities.
When comparing modern mortality improvement over the older pre-industrial, pre-modern-medicine regimes, the "most helpful" reductions vary with the age group you're dealing with
It is not helpful in this context. In order to motivate people to get vaccinated, Luckyo implied that vaccinations were single-handedly responsible for reducing overall childhood mortality from "40-60%" down to modern levels. In reality, vaccinations played a minor role in overall childhood mortality even historically. In the modern world, vaccinations probably have an even smaller effect, since children are well-nourished, well-supported, mostly free of other disease, and at a small risk for secondary infections. Vaccinations have been responsible for reducing overall mortality significantly, but that's for diseases like smallpox and polio, not the classic childhood diseases.
Don't get me wrong: children should get the MMR vaccine; it's sensible and low-risk, and a good thing to do for your fellow citizens too. But spreading FUD about the risk of not getting vaccinated for MMR is not an acceptable way of motivating people to vaccinate their kids. The simple truth is that if you don't get an MMR vaccination, statistically, you're very unlikely to suffer serious consequences even if you get all three diseases as a child.
Right, like drug resistant TB due to people not finishing their courses of medications, or flu which actually kills a lot of people.
No, like adenoviruses, parainfluenza, RSV, EBV, CBV, and many other diseases. We simply don't have vaccines against most viral diseases, and even if we did, it wouldn't be worth vaccinating healthy people against them.
Soap and hot water and hand washing and getting your shots would stop almost all of that.
Contact transmission is the most frequent route, but many hospital acquired infections are spread by droplets, air, vectors, or objects.
Correlation is not causation, but not getting an MMR measles mumps rubella shot is just criminal.
Oh, please, stop the hyperbole. MMR is a sensible, low-risk vaccination. But measles, mumps, and rubella are fairly benign diseases in the grand scheme of things.
Without herd immunity we're starting to see hospitals requiring people to wear masks or stay in isolation wards, measures we never had to do before the "fad" of not getting shots started.
There are a lot of other pathogens; MMR vaccinations really shouldn't affect the decision of who wears masks or gets isolated.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably works with moobs as well.
Yes, because they end up having more money to spend.
The US leveraged the power of "free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit" by taxing it.
Funnily enough, private industry has little incentive competing with government services, in particular if private industry is heavily regulated. And for anything other than satellite launches, there simply hasn't been much incentive for private investment at all. The Soviet union is, of course, still just living off resources created on the back of peasants and workers during the Soviet era.
The moon landing may have been a good political stunt, but scientifically and economically, it was a huge waste of money.
The point of the X-Prize is to show that private space exploration is possible, i.e., that the costs have come down enough so that it makes sense for businesses to start engaging in space exploration, or that it has become cheap enough so that people can do it for fun.
The ability of space exploration by tax-payer funded government entities doesn't need to be established, it was established half a century ago. Communist nations tend to be even better at doing such things in the short run because they can redirect money more easily to such projects even if they don't make sense.
Obama isn't "ambivalent" about the NSA or its programs: he is responsible for them and has for many years.
What you perceive as "ambivalence" is just his difficulty in figuring out how to blame Republicans or corporations for yet another one of his policy disasters.
The problem with that is that nothing that you enter on your phone or that's displayed on your phone is even remotely secure: your carrier, your phone vendor, various intelligence agencies, and police can all compromise your phone at the push of a button.
The problem is that you and the FDA define "working" as "high precision and recall", instead of simply a truthful disclosure of what the test result means. 23andMe is saying "here is the genetic marker, and there is one study that suggests that this marker may indicate...". The test works as advertised. But you think everybody else is illiterate and stupid and is going to make bad decisions, so you want to keep such results from them. And although people like you insist on "risk quantification" and perfection for everybody else, you never show that the stringent regulatory policies you advocate are effective or even necessary. Apply your own criteria to your policy advocacy.
The "good" is that the diagnostic equipment becomes so cheap that people can make it themselves. They can then decide for themselves whether to use it for good or for bad. People are smarter than you give them credit for: far more people will use it responsibly and benefit from it than people who will misuse it and harm themselves. The only people who would really suffer would be doctors and corporations, who see a lucrative source of revenue disappear.
You are deliberately obfuscating and confusing two very different situations: harm to others and harm to myself. Some sort of arbiter is required when person A does something that may directly harm person B; that's when we should require people to get involved based on criteria that we can agree on as a society. Since such positions are frequently responsible for abuse of power, we should also minimize such situations. But an expert's opinion should never be required, let alone their judgment or permission, for things I want to do to myself.
23andMe should be required to be clear and truthful about their results, but they obviously are. Offering an unreliable test with clear disclosure should not be grounds for banning a test.
A used car salesman is an expert on cars and their faults. Does that mean you should trust him? Would you want to pass laws that let used car salesmen decide on your behalf which car to buy? Of course not. Yet, that's what you advocate for medicine.
One can reasonably talk about disclosure requirements for services like 23andMe. But the restrictions you advocate oh services are nothing more than a handout to the medical and insurance industry. In the guise of worrying about consumer safety, you effectively advocate harmful corporatism and privacy intrusions. People like you are responsible for the spiraling health care costs and the inability to deliver good and effective health care to the poorest in our nation.
Are you being serious? No, of course I'm not worried, I think it would be great. How could you possibly think it wouldn't be great?
What's next? Are you going to try to pass laws against skin, testicle, and breast self-exams because people might be confused by the lumps and spots they might discover?
Some doctors do, others are dumber as dirt. Ultimately, the decision belongs to the patient, not the doctor, and the doctor's only job is to give advice if the patient wants it. On the other hand, if the patient discovers something about his body that concerns him, it's the doctor's job to look and explain.
Butter is 3% polyunsaturated fat, and maybe 1% omega-3 if you get grass-fed butter. So, to get the recommended 1-2g of omega-3's per day, you need to consume between 750 and 1500 calories of butter alone. Even if saturated fats don't concern you, that's not going to work for a diet. Other animal fats aren't much better.
There are plenty of studies showing otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturated_fat
What harms your arteries isn't what's stored, it's what gets transported, and that's predominantly what you eat.
Furthermore, on a modern diet, low omega-3 intake is a problem. If you eat more saturated fat, you necessarily eat less omega-3. What's stored in your fat cells has no bearing on that.
I'm sorry to hear about your problems. So you're really going through something acute right now. I wish you good luck with that and a quick recovery. It sounds like you don't have any kind of support or social network. If friends can't help, have you considered getting help from a church or similar organization?
Yes, and how one accomplishes that is what diets are all about.
A normal, older sedentary person can force themselves to eat just enough pasta to fulfill their caloric requirements and then battle a hungry feeling and be miserable for hours. Sooner or later they will fail and fall off their diet.
Or they can eat the right foods and feel full after eating just enough calories. They won't feel miserable, and they won't fall off their diet.
I didn't suggest a low-meat or low protein diet. In fact, I didn't suggest a specific diet at all. I just listed a bunch of things serious dieters should try before starting to pop pills. Obese people usually get too much meat and too much fat along with it, and it's really hard to get all lean meat all the time; switching much of that meat to mix of fish, eggs, and soy is simple and has other benefits, one of which is that it's much easier to control your fat intake associated with the protein you get.
I didn't say the statement was "factually false", I said it was FUD. You appear to be incapable of reading.
I stand by what I said: if you're obese and serious about dieting, cut the saturated fat; you're probably getting too much, and there are better fats. Saturated fats have no health benefits and are probably harmful even from vegetable sources. Since most people need to get more omega-3's and obese people are likely already at risk for CVD, the best thing to do is to pick vegetable oils as rich in omega-3's as possible. Use saturated fats only occasionally, for taste or stability.
Cold pressed vegetable oils, avocados, and fish oils are (with a few exceptions) predominantly unsaturated fats. So it sounds like you mostly got the good kind of fat, you simply didn't realize what you were doing.
You're confusing unsaturated fats and partially hydrogenated vegetable oils; partially hydrogenated vegetable oils are really bad for you.
You're absolutely right: it's balancing calories in/out. Since you're not obese, your appetite control is working and your experience isn't relevant. People who actually are obese and trying to lose weight have a problem stopping to eat when they have already consumed enough calories. That is strongly influenced by the kinds of foods they eat. It happens frequently with starchy foods, foods containing lots of saturated fats, and meats, so any serious dieter should start by cutting those and see whether it helps.
Ask yourself the following:
(1) Are you cooking most of what you eat yourself?
(2) Have you cut all sugar, pasta, bread, and other starchy foods, and most saturated fat and meat from your diet?
(3) Have you been tracking your calories and weight daily for the past month?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no", you haven't seriously tried losing weight, and nothing is likely to help you.
It takes time to establish a new, highly ranked journal because there are big network effects. In addition, the authors and editors of the journal are usually unpaid and not motivated by money, so you can't lure them away with more money; and many of the readers of the journal usually don't pay for the journal but "socialize" the cost, so they don't care that much about how much it costs.
All of that slows down replacing Elsevier with alternatives. But it is happening, faster in some disciplines than in others. Elsevier has crossed a line where people are simply too pissed off to continue living with it.
Spreading FUD like "fact is that around 40-60% of children did not survive to adulthood before vaccinations" is harmful to efforts to get people vaccinated. People like you cast all vaccination proponents in a bad light. Stick to the facts instead of trying to manipulate people through misrepresentations.
Whether you have a variant dopamine receptor is certainly a reasonable thing to include in a genetic testing package like 23andMe: even if current studies don't have clear results about what that means, there is a good chance that there will be meaningful associations in the future. If 23andMe only included those tests for which absolutely clearcut associations had been worked out, people would have to get retested constantly.
The company did what it should have done: it picked a large number of important markers and disclosed things correctly and properly.
Fortunately, this kind of FDA stupidity is not going to work long term: people are simply going to get their entire genomes sequenced, and there will be a huge number of free tools and web sites for searching for disease associations, ancestry, and relatives.
There are plenty of tools and sources that help you analyze the data. Long term, the FDA decision will simply mean that people who are skilled and/or rich enough to go abroad will get the benefit of this analysis, while everybody else will be screwed. Congratulations, FDA, for doing your part in increasing health disparities.
It is not helpful in this context. In order to motivate people to get vaccinated, Luckyo implied that vaccinations were single-handedly responsible for reducing overall childhood mortality from "40-60%" down to modern levels. In reality, vaccinations played a minor role in overall childhood mortality even historically. In the modern world, vaccinations probably have an even smaller effect, since children are well-nourished, well-supported, mostly free of other disease, and at a small risk for secondary infections. Vaccinations have been responsible for reducing overall mortality significantly, but that's for diseases like smallpox and polio, not the classic childhood diseases.
Don't get me wrong: children should get the MMR vaccine; it's sensible and low-risk, and a good thing to do for your fellow citizens too. But spreading FUD about the risk of not getting vaccinated for MMR is not an acceptable way of motivating people to vaccinate their kids. The simple truth is that if you don't get an MMR vaccination, statistically, you're very unlikely to suffer serious consequences even if you get all three diseases as a child.
No, like adenoviruses, parainfluenza, RSV, EBV, CBV, and many other diseases. We simply don't have vaccines against most viral diseases, and even if we did, it wouldn't be worth vaccinating healthy people against them.
Contact transmission is the most frequent route, but many hospital acquired infections are spread by droplets, air, vectors, or objects.
Oh, please, stop the hyperbole. MMR is a sensible, low-risk vaccination. But measles, mumps, and rubella are fairly benign diseases in the grand scheme of things.
There are a lot of other pathogens; MMR vaccinations really shouldn't affect the decision of who wears masks or gets isolated.