So, what you're saying is that in the US, you are free... as long as you don't need money, in which case you're at the mercy and whim of anyone who'd care to employ you.
That's a distortion. By that token, everyone in the whole world is a whore because everyone does things they wouldn't otherwise do in exchange for "considerations" from others.
I refuse to take any job that requires a drug screen. However, one thing other commenters have failed to mention is that a lot of this is driven by the federal government requiring entities that want federal contracts to have a "drug-free workplace". Congress isn't required to be tested themselves, of course.
Yes, some corporations demand a test. I tell them that's not negotiable. I don't even use drugs; this is a matter of principle for me.
But remember, that's just within Target's own loyalty card.
No, it's not. It's tied to your profile they build from your credit card information.
I don't generally object to a given store knowing what I've bought AT that store. Indeed i consider it fairly inevitable.
If that were the extent of it, I would agree. However, cross-linking databases has continued to grow. I bought a vehicle last year, and either the dealer or the manufacturer sold me out because I get phone calls from other dealers around the country trying to sell me extended warranties. Given our discussion so far, it probably it goes without saying I didn't sign up for or disclose any information beyond what was required to purchase the vehicle at the dealer.
After all, I walk up to a cashier show them all my purchases, they look at my face, and then take my payment... if they wanted to keep track of people paying cash, it's all there.
That's a fantasy... are you alleging a human could assign some sort of biometric identifier or do some sort of lookup to build a profile to associate with your cash purchases? If you're talking about paying cash at Jim's Bait Shop in a town with a population of 733 and Jim is your wife's cousin, then that's different because Jim knows you personally. Also, Jim's Bait Shop doesn't have a data warehouse. With credit card transactions at a computerized point-of-sale terminal, the record for a chain store is preassembled for data warehousing and profile building.
Now, given the trends, I do expect Walmart/Target to eventually do facial recognition with their CCTV cameras to associate cash purchases with profiles as well as to build meta-profiles of who you shop with. They are already trying to track you as you wander through the store in terms of in which areas you linger, to further target your profile.
But the [Facebook] system allegedly isn't personally providing purchase personally identifying information.
Of *course* it is. Both Facebook and the store are hashing the same information to create up with the customer profile identifier. The store provides the details of your transaction. At this point, Facebook has both halves of the "anonymized" data, and we are supposed to trust that they discard that rather than retaining the link between the data elements. The brick & mortar store might not have the transaction linkage, but FB does.
you are probably over estimating the value of the data.
As I said, if data in databases had an expiration date rather than being ever further cross-linked, and profile data were limited to in-store purposes only, then that might be tolerable. Instead, we have to think 4th dimensionally and anticipate what might happen if anything collected at any point in the past were made available to any other adversarial entity in the future.
Case in point: I signed a petition for a recall election. Some fuckers at a data warehousing firm (with a certain political bent) teamed up with the local newspaper (with the same bent), digitized all the data from the petitions and dumped them online, with everyone's name, address, and age. They had it indexed by google and it's still online 3 years after the fact. I didn't enjoy the semi-threatening political mailers I received from the recallee's campaign, and only the people who signed the recall petition received these.
The board of election protested, but the newspaper claimed this douchebaggery was some sort of important public access "historical record". There's a difference between a public record for someone to go examine a paper-based index in person vs. building a database for sale that anyone can trivially profile.
My point is that data gets abused, and the only protection against it is to not have potentially damaging data collected. Sometimes it's hard to predict what might be damaging (4th dimensionally speaking). Filling out ethnic
I guess it comes down to how difficult it is to load the stored value card, doesn't it? I view this as tantamount to the amount of cash I'm carrying vs the cash I have in my ATM-linked account. I'm willing to carry several hundred in cash. By the same token, I would be willing to carry several hundred in stored value. More than that and cash gets unwieldy. I blame the government for refusing to issue larger denomination bills despite inflation.
What stored value cards can give you is a way to purchase things anonymouslyespecially online purchases, which is otherwise a nigh-intractable problem. Yes, some places take money orders, but you have to go get one, mail it across the country to the merchant, wait for it to clear due to fraud paranoia, etc. Bitcoin is really a non-starter for commerce, comparatively speaking.
It's generally easier to replace a lost/stolen/destroyed stored value card than it is to try to reassemble fragments of cash. Yes, you should keep your documentation for the card, but we are comparing that to scotch tape + fragments of cash. And this is with *existing* technology, not some purpose-designed reloadable smart card stored value thing.
I think you are strongly underestimating the amount of tracking and profiling that happens when you make purchases using a credit card. I presume you're familiar with Target's "pregnancy detection" profiling that caused an uproar a few years ago. What about Facebook linking the purchases you make in brick & mortar stores to ads they have shown you while you're browsing? Yeah, that one surprised even me: directly linking in-person purchases to online browsing done elsewhere. Grocery stores/Walmart know exactly what you buy when you swipe, and they log all that... I bet a person's alcohol/tobacco purchase profile over the years would be quite valuable data for an insurance company. Furthermore, this kind of "third/fourth party" access is how the government works around a lot of 4th amendment impediments: they just buy the data from a broker when they couldn't constitutionally obtain it otherwise.
Like I said, I use credit cards. Hell, I probably use them for the majority of my purchases. I am just aware of the fact that each time I use one it is adding data to databases that are used to build profiles. And data in databases never dies; perhaps today's "creepy tracking" is fine, but I don't know what kind of innovations they will come up with in the future.
So, I protect my privacy as I deem appropriate through the judicious use of cash or stored value cards. I suppose this is also a matter of perspective: I consider the risk of database purchase profile data to have a larger potential for adverse consequences for me than the risk of losing the amount of cash/stored value I carry.
Yes. I don't wander around the streets with $100s or $1000s of dollars on me for precisely those reasons.
You're cherry-picking scenarios. Who said you have to load thousands of dollars at a time on a preloaded cash-equivalent card?
I don't really get it with cash either if the person taking my money knows who I am.
Again with the cherry-picking. Do we really want to play this game? Because an equivalent cherry picked boundary case scenario against credit cards would be where a merchant fraudulently charges your card, the credit card company decides to reject your chargeback/fraud allegation for whatever reason, and then you lost in court when you decided to sue.
What's that you say, this doesn't normally happen? Exactly. Just admit it: cash is basically anonymous, just like credit card chargebacks usually work.
... through a controversial data-mining program that is widely regarded as operating outside its legal authority... So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.
Great. I'm on board with you there. I'm sure they'll stop if we ask nicely. Or if we pass some laws. *cough* You know that wasn't the sole data collection program. Look at what the DEA has been doing with phone records... puts the NSA to shame.
So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.
Oh wait, are you talking about the violent overthrow of the US government? Because that's pretty much what it will take to get them to stop at this point.
But sure in the meantime, if you are buying something you don't want tracked arrange for an cash envelope drop in a park at night on Halloween or something.
And you're welcome to enjoy having the federal government track everything you do while paying the credit card companies for that "privilege" through interest charges and higher prices passed through to you by retailers.
Oh, look: I can misrepresent your position just as easily as you do mine.
BTW, before your jerking knee hits your chin, note that I never said I don't use credit cards. My point is that there are tradeoffs, and that you are misrepresenting stored value cards by only discussing cherry-picked boundary cases. When was the last time you were mugged/robbed, had your house burgled, lost a non-trivial amount of cash, or had cash destroyed in a fire? Yes, these things can all happen, but for most of us they are extremely rare occurrences.
Just give me a card that plugs into the USB port and that I can charge up at the 7-11 with cash...
And then when someone steals it, or it just spontaneously stops working one day... sure you'll still be ok with that?
I take it you find cash fatally flawed for those same reasons: the possibility of theft, loss, or destruction.
Of course, cash is anonymous—which you don't get with a credit card or check. Are you okay with the federal government tracking every purchase you make with plastic? Because they are.
How about we stop using a non renewable resource critical to many industrial processes to create energy.
Have a citation that hydrocarbons are a non-renewable resource? Because photosynthesizers and the Fischer-Tropsch process would like to have a word with you.
Don't conflate stored energy with the storage medium.
its time to get the government out of marriage completely. there is no good reason for it to be there.
That's exactly what my partner and I decided. We solved the issues that uninformed people claim are intractable via the judicious use of wills, living wills, a health care power of attorney, and so on. There is no reason the state should be involved in dictating how interpersonal relationships should be setup.
Most of those documents my partner and I used have "fill-in the blank" versions available, so there's really no excuse. Besides, getting these documents prepared and notarized does a better job of ensuring that people are actually thinking about these contingencies rather than just blithely going about their business until something horrible happens.
Derecognition of marriage of any sort would have sidestepped the whole gay marriage shitstorm. Besides, you know that the next debacle (in no more than a generation or two) will be legal recognition of poly marriage, and given our brain-dead approach to solving the gay marriage "problem" we will end up with some sort of horrible kludge "solution" to that as well. Just get the state out of interpersonal relationships; let individual religions offer to recognize/bless whatever relationships they find to be compatible with their principles.
I want equality under law: why should two people in a government-sanctioned relationship have benefits that those same two individuals could not access outside the bounds of a state-approved relationship?
Okay, we're done if you aren't going to believe the plethora of evidence that is trivially available. Hepatitis C can cause liver cancer. I mean, at this point you are asserting that everyone, the WHO included, is delusional or is in on a vast conspiracy.
This is not something that gets cited to a handful of peer reviewed studies (which you will reject anyway) when the causal relationship is known and was elucidated a long time ago.
You are asking me to provide a study that would make me change my mind that there is a causal link between chronic hep c infection and developing cirrhosis and subsequently liver cancer? Are you serious? How about you provide a reputable study that asserts chronic hep c infection is harmless and purports to show that this patient population has no increased risk for cirrhosis or cancer.
I understand you're skeptical, but here's how this particular claim works: 1) Chronic hepatitis C infection causes cirrhosis & cancer. 1a) This is caused by a virus (no, I'm not going to cite that either) 2) Current therapy regimens have abysmal cure rates, and often result in resistant forms of the virus causing refractoriness to the therapy 3) Sofosbuvir was designed to inhibit a specific virally coded enzyme (the viral RNA polymerase). This worked in vitro and subsequently in clinical trials. 4) Studies have shown sofobuvir can clear the viral infection as a monotherapy in the preponderance of cases. 5) Clearing the virus stops the ongoing damage to the liver that is caused by virus. 6) Thus, the hep c induced cirrhosis/cancer is "cured" before it has a chance to manifest.
Now, if you want to debate whether big pharma is acting ethically, we can discuss how they priced the curative therapy at 90% of the expected lifetime cost of care for a patient with hepatitis C, resulting in a charge of something like $90k per patient/course of treatment. This is controversial because, for example, the charge to California taxpayer-funded healthcarr programs alone would be in the billions of dollars.
Can't decide if you're being deliberately dense or are just ignorant. You will note also the WHO link on the first page of results, among the plethora of other confirmations. The burden of proof is on you if you believe there is no link between hep c and liver cancer (what do you think these people are dying of, anyway?). This is like asserting there is no link between bacterial infection and otitis media.
Furthermore, if you're asserting that patients cured of hep c remain at equivalent risk to develop liver carcinoma as if the virus is allowed to continue wreaking havoc on the liver, then the burden of proof is on you there as well. Proposing a mechanism for that would be a start.
Seriously, next up you will be expecting pubmed citations (that you will reject out of hand) that beta-lactams have any bacteriocidal effect. Because that's what Alexander Fleming wanted you to believe, and the decades of results in research and practice are nothing more than statistical error or deliberate academic fraud.
You lack reading comprehension. You seem dead set on requesting something like this, so here you go: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sofosbuvi...
Surprise, the results are right there, without any need for you to feign some sort of difficulty trying to locate them on pubmed. It's almost like you're being deliberately disingenuous. Oh wait, it's not "almost like".
You're free to presume that a patient who has had their hep c cured is still prone to develop liver carcinoma/cirrhosis, but now the burden of proof is on you to propose the etiology and back that up with studies.
Since you have apparently found pubmed, though lack the ability to operate a search there, you can also see what imatinib has done for the survival rates of patients with bcr-abl.
But, you know, I already called it: you aren't convinced by peer reviewed studies.
No, a competent reader wouldn't spitefully request a lmgtfy.com link. Go ahead and try Google. Hell, sofosbuvir is in the mainstream media, ffs.
I provided two examples of big pharma drugs that can cure cancer, the evidence for which is trivially confirmable. I didn't bother giving links, because as I said, most people making these aspersions against big pharma and their alleged "non cure" conspiracies have already made up their minds and won't be convinced by facts or peer-reviewed studies.
I was eagerly anticipating the Nexus 9. However, when I read the Google product page I was very disappointed.
For $400, I expected it to have 3+ GB of RAM and more than 16 GB of storage. What kind of specs are those? Is this 2012? Hell, I would have been willing to pay even *more* for a Nexus 9 if it only had decent specs, but alas, that's not an option.
Guess I will have to wait for a viable 64-bit Android tablet. Maybe next year.
Here you go: some people are applying the precautionary principle due to concerns about potentially as-yet undefined health concerns from consuming GMO foods. "Non-GMO glucose", while an imprecise term, putatively means the glucose was sourced/refined from non-GMO stock materials and thus would be unlikely to have any of the possible contamination they wish to avoid.
Absolutely true. The Agent Orange used in Vietnam was approximately 99.5% pure herbicide. Of course, that remaining 0.5% was TCDD...
For example, I'm convinced that in the future people will be revolted thinking about the pharmaceuticals and metabolites we currently dump out untreated from our wastewater treatment plants (and thus the people downstream from us consume).
Someone gave me one of those organic Kind Bars the other day that listed 'non-GMO glucose' as an ingredient. "Thank God!" I thought. I hate it when my C6H12O6 has it's genome altered! And to think, they say the opposition to genetic engineering is just ignorance and marketing.
Yes, and the polio vaccine that had SV40 contamination was pure to the limits of detection at the time (i.e. they had no idea it included SV40 or that SV40 was a threat).
If the vaccine batches had been labeled "non-green monkey serum" as appropriate then that would have correlated with a lack of the adverse outcomes caused by SV40 contamination that the people who were exposed to the other vaccine lots were exposed to.
Your attempt at satire is puerile. In fact, in case you couldn't follow the logic I will restate the point in small words.
1. Nothing is completely pure. 2. Some contaminants do bad things to people, even at levels we can't measure today. 3. Sometimes it takes decades before these problems are found by scientists. By then the damage is done.
"general welfare" as part of the spending power section is all that congress needs to craft well considered laws.
Not true. The historical record very clearly shows that the "general welfare" clause was a restrictive clause, not a permissive one.
This is the only sane interpretation; otherwise, the entire Constitution is subsumed by this this one clause and the Constitution then becomes, "Fuck it all, guys, do whatever you want."
Which, of course, is what happened. I dislike having a written constitution for this very reason: it's insulting to my intelligence for the Supremes to take the verbiage of this document and twist it around to rubber stamp whatever the feds have decided to do anyway.
Because the feds cannot be restrained—they are going to do whatever they want regardless—I'd prefer they not lie and tell me that this is what the founders intended. I vastly prefer the straight-up honesty of an unwritten constitution followed by, "Pray I don't alter it any further..."
This is all very reasonable and seems like a good critique to put forth in the context of debating Republicans. I certainly hadn't noticed this contrast before you pointed it out.
I still assert that the meme that claims Eisenhower or Reagan would be considered Democrats today is demonstrably false. It is apt, of course, to note how the ratchet of an increasingly authoritarian federal government has turned, particularly after the election of Woodrow Wilson. Therefore, I would concur that Eisenhower (and potentially even Reagan) might not be considered electable today given their vision of a more limited role for the federal government.
Not even the GOP wants federalism anymore.
The progressives' vision has shifted the Overton window on that. No one can be elected on a platform calling for the repeal of the present incarnation of Johnson's Great Society or FDR's New Deal programs, for example. So, from that perspective, all GOP presidents have been Democrat, even at the time when they were elected. It's just yet another example why the meme is absurd.
Where the Republicans and Democrats really clash is on the social spectrum. Both parties wield the federal government as a cudgel against freedom, but they differ in which rights they wish to suppress. And unless people can start pointing to how Eisenhower/Reagan were pro choice, gay rights, etc advocates and the GOP has shifted rightward from that... it's obvious the meme just doesn't work.
You raise better, more coherent points than sjames did.
However, it occurs to me that Washington and Jefferson are still venerated across the political spectrum despite being unelectable today. Mostly because of their status as slaveholders, and in our modern society we see that past sins of certain kinds are rarely forgiven.
I guess I hadn't noticed that Democrats don't hold up their historical figures as champions of their perspective. Not too many are still fond of LBJ, I take it, despite holding dear to his legacy of massive expansion of the welfare state.
I will pay closer attention to this party idiosyncrasy in the future.
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So, what you're saying is that in the US, you are free... as long as you don't need money, in which case you're at the mercy and whim of anyone who'd care to employ you.
That's a distortion. By that token, everyone in the whole world is a whore because everyone does things they wouldn't otherwise do in exchange for "considerations" from others.
I refuse to take any job that requires a drug screen. However, one thing other commenters have failed to mention is that a lot of this is driven by the federal government requiring entities that want federal contracts to have a "drug-free workplace". Congress isn't required to be tested themselves, of course.
Yes, some corporations demand a test. I tell them that's not negotiable. I don't even use drugs; this is a matter of principle for me.
But remember, that's just within Target's own loyalty card.
No, it's not. It's tied to your profile they build from your credit card information.
I don't generally object to a given store knowing what I've bought AT that store. Indeed i consider it fairly inevitable.
If that were the extent of it, I would agree. However, cross-linking databases has continued to grow. I bought a vehicle last year, and either the dealer or the manufacturer sold me out because I get phone calls from other dealers around the country trying to sell me extended warranties. Given our discussion so far, it probably it goes without saying I didn't sign up for or disclose any information beyond what was required to purchase the vehicle at the dealer.
After all, I walk up to a cashier show them all my purchases, they look at my face, and then take my payment... if they wanted to keep track of people paying cash, it's all there.
That's a fantasy... are you alleging a human could assign some sort of biometric identifier or do some sort of lookup to build a profile to associate with your cash purchases? If you're talking about paying cash at Jim's Bait Shop in a town with a population of 733 and Jim is your wife's cousin, then that's different because Jim knows you personally. Also, Jim's Bait Shop doesn't have a data warehouse. With credit card transactions at a computerized point-of-sale terminal, the record for a chain store is preassembled for data warehousing and profile building.
Now, given the trends, I do expect Walmart/Target to eventually do facial recognition with their CCTV cameras to associate cash purchases with profiles as well as to build meta-profiles of who you shop with. They are already trying to track you as you wander through the store in terms of in which areas you linger, to further target your profile.
But the [Facebook] system allegedly isn't personally providing purchase personally identifying information.
Of *course* it is. Both Facebook and the store are hashing the same information to create up with the customer profile identifier. The store provides the details of your transaction. At this point, Facebook has both halves of the "anonymized" data, and we are supposed to trust that they discard that rather than retaining the link between the data elements. The brick & mortar store might not have the transaction linkage, but FB does.
you are probably over estimating the value of the data.
As I said, if data in databases had an expiration date rather than being ever further cross-linked, and profile data were limited to in-store purposes only, then that might be tolerable. Instead, we have to think 4th dimensionally and anticipate what might happen if anything collected at any point in the past were made available to any other adversarial entity in the future.
Case in point: I signed a petition for a recall election. Some fuckers at a data warehousing firm (with a certain political bent) teamed up with the local newspaper (with the same bent), digitized all the data from the petitions and dumped them online, with everyone's name, address, and age. They had it indexed by google and it's still online 3 years after the fact. I didn't enjoy the semi-threatening political mailers I received from the recallee's campaign, and only the people who signed the recall petition received these.
The board of election protested, but the newspaper claimed this douchebaggery was some sort of important public access "historical record". There's a difference between a public record for someone to go examine a paper-based index in person vs. building a database for sale that anyone can trivially profile.
My point is that data gets abused, and the only protection against it is to not have potentially damaging data collected. Sometimes it's hard to predict what might be damaging (4th dimensionally speaking). Filling out ethnic
I guess it comes down to how difficult it is to load the stored value card, doesn't it? I view this as tantamount to the amount of cash I'm carrying vs the cash I have in my ATM-linked account. I'm willing to carry several hundred in cash. By the same token, I would be willing to carry several hundred in stored value. More than that and cash gets unwieldy. I blame the government for refusing to issue larger denomination bills despite inflation.
What stored value cards can give you is a way to purchase things anonymouslyespecially online purchases, which is otherwise a nigh-intractable problem. Yes, some places take money orders, but you have to go get one, mail it across the country to the merchant, wait for it to clear due to fraud paranoia, etc. Bitcoin is really a non-starter for commerce, comparatively speaking.
It's generally easier to replace a lost/stolen/destroyed stored value card than it is to try to reassemble fragments of cash. Yes, you should keep your documentation for the card, but we are comparing that to scotch tape + fragments of cash. And this is with *existing* technology, not some purpose-designed reloadable smart card stored value thing.
I think you are strongly underestimating the amount of tracking and profiling that happens when you make purchases using a credit card. I presume you're familiar with Target's "pregnancy detection" profiling that caused an uproar a few years ago. What about Facebook linking the purchases you make in brick & mortar stores to ads they have shown you while you're browsing? Yeah, that one surprised even me: directly linking in-person purchases to online browsing done elsewhere. Grocery stores/Walmart know exactly what you buy when you swipe, and they log all that... I bet a person's alcohol/tobacco purchase profile over the years would be quite valuable data for an insurance company. Furthermore, this kind of "third/fourth party" access is how the government works around a lot of 4th amendment impediments: they just buy the data from a broker when they couldn't constitutionally obtain it otherwise.
Like I said, I use credit cards. Hell, I probably use them for the majority of my purchases. I am just aware of the fact that each time I use one it is adding data to databases that are used to build profiles. And data in databases never dies; perhaps today's "creepy tracking" is fine, but I don't know what kind of innovations they will come up with in the future.
So, I protect my privacy as I deem appropriate through the judicious use of cash or stored value cards. I suppose this is also a matter of perspective: I consider the risk of database purchase profile data to have a larger potential for adverse consequences for me than the risk of losing the amount of cash/stored value I carry.
Yes. I don't wander around the streets with $100s or $1000s of dollars on me for precisely those reasons.
You're cherry-picking scenarios. Who said you have to load thousands of dollars at a time on a preloaded cash-equivalent card?
I don't really get it with cash either if the person taking my money knows who I am.
Again with the cherry-picking. Do we really want to play this game? Because an equivalent cherry picked boundary case scenario against credit cards would be where a merchant fraudulently charges your card, the credit card company decides to reject your chargeback/fraud allegation for whatever reason, and then you lost in court when you decided to sue.
What's that you say, this doesn't normally happen? Exactly. Just admit it: cash is basically anonymous, just like credit card chargebacks usually work.
Great. I'm on board with you there. I'm sure they'll stop if we ask nicely. Or if we pass some laws. *cough* You know that wasn't the sole data collection program. Look at what the DEA has been doing with phone records... puts the NSA to shame.
So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.
Oh wait, are you talking about the violent overthrow of the US government? Because that's pretty much what it will take to get them to stop at this point.
But sure in the meantime, if you are buying something you don't want tracked arrange for an cash envelope drop in a park at night on Halloween or something.
And you're welcome to enjoy having the federal government track everything you do while paying the credit card companies for that "privilege" through interest charges and higher prices passed through to you by retailers.
Oh, look: I can misrepresent your position just as easily as you do mine.
BTW, before your jerking knee hits your chin, note that I never said I don't use credit cards. My point is that there are tradeoffs, and that you are misrepresenting stored value cards by only discussing cherry-picked boundary cases. When was the last time you were mugged/robbed, had your house burgled, lost a non-trivial amount of cash, or had cash destroyed in a fire? Yes, these things can all happen, but for most of us they are extremely rare occurrences.
Just give me a card that plugs into the USB port and that I can charge up at the 7-11 with cash...
And then when someone steals it, or it just spontaneously stops working one day... sure you'll still be ok with that?
I take it you find cash fatally flawed for those same reasons: the possibility of theft, loss, or destruction.
Of course, cash is anonymous—which you don't get with a credit card or check. Are you okay with the federal government tracking every purchase you make with plastic? Because they are.
How about we stop using a non renewable resource critical to many industrial processes to create energy.
Have a citation that hydrocarbons are a non-renewable resource? Because photosynthesizers and the Fischer-Tropsch process would like to have a word with you.
Don't conflate stored energy with the storage medium.
its time to get the government out of marriage completely. there is no good reason for it to be there.
That's exactly what my partner and I decided. We solved the issues that uninformed people claim are intractable via the judicious use of wills, living wills, a health care power of attorney, and so on. There is no reason the state should be involved in dictating how interpersonal relationships should be setup.
Most of those documents my partner and I used have "fill-in the blank" versions available, so there's really no excuse. Besides, getting these documents prepared and notarized does a better job of ensuring that people are actually thinking about these contingencies rather than just blithely going about their business until something horrible happens.
Derecognition of marriage of any sort would have sidestepped the whole gay marriage shitstorm. Besides, you know that the next debacle (in no more than a generation or two) will be legal recognition of poly marriage, and given our brain-dead approach to solving the gay marriage "problem" we will end up with some sort of horrible kludge "solution" to that as well. Just get the state out of interpersonal relationships; let individual religions offer to recognize/bless whatever relationships they find to be compatible with their principles.
I want equality under law: why should two people in a government-sanctioned relationship have benefits that those same two individuals could not access outside the bounds of a state-approved relationship?
Okay, we're done if you aren't going to believe the plethora of evidence that is trivially available. Hepatitis C can cause liver cancer. I mean, at this point you are asserting that everyone, the WHO included, is delusional or is in on a vast conspiracy.
This is not something that gets cited to a handful of peer reviewed studies (which you will reject anyway) when the causal relationship is known and was elucidated a long time ago.
Oh look, more trivial googling.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/...
You are asking me to provide a study that would make me change my mind that there is a causal link between chronic hep c infection and developing cirrhosis and subsequently liver cancer? Are you serious? How about you provide a reputable study that asserts chronic hep c infection is harmless and purports to show that this patient population has no increased risk for cirrhosis or cancer.
I understand you're skeptical, but here's how this particular claim works:
1) Chronic hepatitis C infection causes cirrhosis & cancer.
1a) This is caused by a virus (no, I'm not going to cite that either)
2) Current therapy regimens have abysmal cure rates, and often result in resistant forms of the virus causing refractoriness to the therapy
3) Sofosbuvir was designed to inhibit a specific virally coded enzyme (the viral RNA polymerase). This worked in vitro and subsequently in clinical trials.
4) Studies have shown sofobuvir can clear the viral infection as a monotherapy in the preponderance of cases.
5) Clearing the virus stops the ongoing damage to the liver that is caused by virus.
6) Thus, the hep c induced cirrhosis/cancer is "cured" before it has a chance to manifest.
Now, if you want to debate whether big pharma is acting ethically, we can discuss how they priced the curative therapy at 90% of the expected lifetime cost of care for a patient with hepatitis C, resulting in a charge of something like $90k per patient/course of treatment. This is controversial because, for example, the charge to California taxpayer-funded healthcarr programs alone would be in the billions of dollars.
Exactly what evidence has convinced you there is a link between hep-c and liver carcinoma?
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22hepati...
Can't decide if you're being deliberately dense or are just ignorant. You will note also the WHO link on the first page of results, among the plethora of other confirmations. The burden of proof is on you if you believe there is no link between hep c and liver cancer (what do you think these people are dying of, anyway?). This is like asserting there is no link between bacterial infection and otitis media.
Furthermore, if you're asserting that patients cured of hep c remain at equivalent risk to develop liver carcinoma as if the virus is allowed to continue wreaking havoc on the liver, then the burden of proof is on you there as well. Proposing a mechanism for that would be a start.
Seriously, next up you will be expecting pubmed citations (that you will reject out of hand) that beta-lactams have any bacteriocidal effect. Because that's what Alexander Fleming wanted you to believe, and the decades of results in research and practice are nothing more than statistical error or deliberate academic fraud.
You lack reading comprehension. You seem dead set on requesting something like this, so here you go:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sofosbuvi...
Surprise, the results are right there, without any need for you to feign some sort of difficulty trying to locate them on pubmed. It's almost like you're being deliberately disingenuous. Oh wait, it's not "almost like".
You're free to presume that a patient who has had their hep c cured is still prone to develop liver carcinoma/cirrhosis, but now the burden of proof is on you to propose the etiology and back that up with studies.
Since you have apparently found pubmed, though lack the ability to operate a search there, you can also see what imatinib has done for the survival rates of patients with bcr-abl.
But, you know, I already called it: you aren't convinced by peer reviewed studies.
Here are the results of the goddamn clinical trial for sofosbuvir, which were published in JAMA, you lazy fuck:
http://www.gilead.com/news/pre...
No, a competent reader wouldn't spitefully request a lmgtfy.com link. Go ahead and try Google. Hell, sofosbuvir is in the mainstream media, ffs.
I provided two examples of big pharma drugs that can cure cancer, the evidence for which is trivially confirmable. I didn't bother giving links, because as I said, most people making these aspersions against big pharma and their alleged "non cure" conspiracies have already made up their minds and won't be convinced by facts or peer-reviewed studies.
It's true. I misparsed the quote block while reading your post. Enjoy the violent agreement.
Well then, please explain why "Big Pharma" has delivered cures for multiple kinds of cancer over the last couple of decades.
Go ahead, we're all waiting...
Imatinib.
Sofosbuvir. (remember, the endgame of hep c is liver cancer, so this is both a viral cure and a cancer cure by preventing that outcome)
That's off the top of my head. I'd put effort into searching for more, but we both know you're just going to move the goalposts.
Or teach them to put covers on speed camera lenses...
You need to expand your concept of civil disobedience
I was eagerly anticipating the Nexus 9. However, when I read the Google product page I was very disappointed.
For $400, I expected it to have 3+ GB of RAM and more than 16 GB of storage. What kind of specs are those? Is this 2012? Hell, I would have been willing to pay even *more* for a Nexus 9 if it only had decent specs, but alas, that's not an option.
Guess I will have to wait for a viable 64-bit Android tablet. Maybe next year.
Here you go: some people are applying the precautionary principle due to concerns about potentially as-yet undefined health concerns from consuming GMO foods. "Non-GMO glucose", while an imprecise term, putatively means the glucose was sourced/refined from non-GMO stock materials and thus would be unlikely to have any of the possible contamination they wish to avoid.
Do try to keep up.
I have a 1MW block of concrete you'll be interested in seeing;
Actually, I would be interested in seeing you input 1MW into a block of concrete. Got a youtube link?
In the meantime, ob. fun bideos
E=MC2
There is far far far more than a megawatt of energy in a block of concrete already.
Oh for the ironic, ignominious pedantry fail.
Absolutely true. The Agent Orange used in Vietnam was approximately 99.5% pure herbicide. Of course, that remaining 0.5% was TCDD...
For example, I'm convinced that in the future people will be revolted thinking about the pharmaceuticals and metabolites we currently dump out untreated from our wastewater treatment plants (and thus the people downstream from us consume).
Someone gave me one of those organic Kind Bars the other day that listed 'non-GMO glucose' as an ingredient. "Thank God!" I thought. I hate it when my C6H12O6 has it's genome altered! And to think, they say the opposition to genetic engineering is just ignorance and marketing.
Yes, and the polio vaccine that had SV40 contamination was pure to the limits of detection at the time (i.e. they had no idea it included SV40 or that SV40 was a threat).
If the vaccine batches had been labeled "non-green monkey serum" as appropriate then that would have correlated with a lack of the adverse outcomes caused by SV40 contamination that the people who were exposed to the other vaccine lots were exposed to.
Your attempt at satire is puerile. In fact, in case you couldn't follow the logic I will restate the point in small words.
1. Nothing is completely pure.
2. Some contaminants do bad things to people, even at levels we can't measure today.
3. Sometimes it takes decades before these problems are found by scientists. By then the damage is done.
But eat the kind bar, or not. I don't care.
"general welfare" as part of the spending power section is all that congress
needs to craft well considered laws.
Not true. The historical record very clearly shows that the "general welfare" clause was a restrictive clause, not a permissive one.
This is the only sane interpretation; otherwise, the entire Constitution is subsumed by this this one clause and the Constitution then becomes, "Fuck it all, guys, do whatever you want."
Which, of course, is what happened. I dislike having a written constitution for this very reason: it's insulting to my intelligence for the Supremes to take the verbiage of this document and twist it around to rubber stamp whatever the feds have decided to do anyway.
Because the feds cannot be restrained—they are going to do whatever they want regardless—I'd prefer they not lie and tell me that this is what the founders intended. I vastly prefer the straight-up honesty of an unwritten constitution followed by, "Pray I don't alter it any further..."
This is all very reasonable and seems like a good critique to put forth in the context of debating Republicans. I certainly hadn't noticed this contrast before you pointed it out.
I still assert that the meme that claims Eisenhower or Reagan would be considered Democrats today is demonstrably false. It is apt, of course, to note how the ratchet of an increasingly authoritarian federal government has turned, particularly after the election of Woodrow Wilson. Therefore, I would concur that Eisenhower (and potentially even Reagan) might not be considered electable today given their vision of a more limited role for the federal government.
Not even the GOP wants federalism anymore.
The progressives' vision has shifted the Overton window on that. No one can be elected on a platform calling for the repeal of the present incarnation of Johnson's Great Society or FDR's New Deal programs, for example. So, from that perspective, all GOP presidents have been Democrat, even at the time when they were elected. It's just yet another example why the meme is absurd.
Where the Republicans and Democrats really clash is on the social spectrum. Both parties wield the federal government as a cudgel against freedom, but they differ in which rights they wish to suppress. And unless people can start pointing to how Eisenhower/Reagan were pro choice, gay rights, etc advocates and the GOP has shifted rightward from that... it's obvious the meme just doesn't work.
Though it would be interesting to see how long a Bear would take to open a CCCP'd space capsule.
I bet these bears would be quite adept and preconditioned to try it.
You raise better, more coherent points than sjames did.
However, it occurs to me that Washington and Jefferson are still venerated across the political spectrum despite being unelectable today. Mostly because of their status as slaveholders, and in our modern society we see that past sins of certain kinds are rarely forgiven.
I guess I hadn't noticed that Democrats don't hold up their historical figures as champions of their perspective. Not too many are still fond of LBJ, I take it, despite holding dear to his legacy of massive expansion of the welfare state.
I will pay closer attention to this party idiosyncrasy in the future.
I see you have decided to recuse yourself from rational debate. Your fallacy is... strawman!
So sorry, but we do have some lovely parting gifts for you, though.