It's supposed to assure us that the medications we take are both safe and effective. In practice, we have seen approvals of compounds that later turn out to be dangerous (Vioxx) or ineffective, as in this case. Meanwhile, the glacial pace of the FDA approval process makes every drug we buy more expensive than it should be.
Time to make FDA ratings advisory, rather than mandatory. Let patients, doctors and insurance companies decide whether they want to stay with the gold standard of FDA-approved, or take a risk on something new and still in the pipeline, or use one of the many medications that are approved in Europe or Japan, but have not yet passed the FDA.
And no, there wouldn't be the explosion of quackery you fear. "Alternative medicines" are already exempt from FDA scrutiny as 'supplements', so that whole area would see no change.
Whenever you hand your credit card to a clerk, there is a possibility that it could be scammed. Your card information could go into the retailer's database, which can eventually be hacked, compromising millions of people at once.
Phone payment systems, on the other hand, can be set up so that only a one-time code gets transmitted to the retailer. It can't be used for anything after the one transaction, and there is nothing to store in a vulnerable database.
Interesting that you should mention Germany. I have spent a lot of time there visiting in-laws. Unfortunately the yammerhead form of environmentalists is dominant in German politics over any organism with brain cells, so the country is actually moving its power baseload from nuclear to coal - lignite, the one in-ground resource it has left, with the energy content and carbon profile of damp firewood. This requires digging the world's largest strip mine (Tagebau Garzweiler, soon to be succeeded by an even larger strip mine that will eventually top out at eighty-five square kilometers.
Meanwhile, massive feed-in tariffs (subsidies) have pushed German wind and solar to unprecedented build-out. Transporting power from the windy northern flats of Friesland to southerly markets requires a new transmission line called the Stromautobahn ("Power freeway"), which is being held up by the same Greens who promoted all that wind in the first place. No problem, though; just raise taxes a little more and surreptitiously buy more power from France.
I see another advantage. The airport thugs don't know that it can function as a laptop, so you van get away with leaving one of these in your bag, with the tablet you use as a screen. I love living in the future!
But by the time it was built, the Depression was biting deeply and the Republican Party had vanished entirely, not to return until the end of WW II brought a new set of issues to the political field. But fortunately, Thirties Democrats were the old can-do generation, not Boomers who reflexively oppose building anything significantly large. That's why the 2008 stimulus had to be frittered away on a miscellaneous host of projects too small to attract the attention of the Luddite lobby.
The euphemism they used, if you remember, was "shovel-ready." They knew that any attempt to build something on the scale of Hoover Dam today would cause most of the money to be spent on lawyers.
Your link describes a reinforcement project in the tunnel undertaken because it crosses a tectonic plate boundary underwater. In what way do you think it is not doing this?
All of the small renewable energy sources are location-dependent. Some places are sunny, others are windy, and occasionally you will find an old volcanic stump with residual geothermal heat. These sources will certainly help, especially in applications that can tolerate fluctuating power, such as charging EV batteries. But now what if your "smart environmentalists" are right about climate? If we really have to eliminate fossil sources in one generation, only nuclear will make up for the massive baseload we now have in coal and gas. The other sort of environmentalist answers, "All we have to do is get rid of energy-intensive industries and switch our economy over to software consultants and artisanal brewing?"
But the rest of us, and our creditors, would prefer to keep our day jobs.
Gee, you mean I was just imagining the harridan hordes of Hollywood stars and hippie mothers who filed useless delaying lawsuits against every single nuclear plant and domestic gas well and every mile of road and rail, who ripped up fields of GMO produce, who even tried to stop NASA from launching the Galileo and Cassini probes on grounds they were "sending nuclear power into space"?
So why don't you people let us generate more of it? And let us build the electric alternative infrastructure, like the high-speed rail being described here, that would cut down on our use of petroleum.
Once upon a time, socialists built Hoover Dam and the TVA, including a lot of projects that conservatives of the time opposed as being unnecessary spending. But during the Seventies, the political positions switched, with the children of the New Dealers relentlessly opposing every energy and transportation project proposed. California high-speed rail is just the latest.
Today, even pure scientific research is under attack. Now astronomy, the least polluting of the sciences, is being driven out of our country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The old observation that 'steam engines were invented when it was steam engine time' is not a reflection on basic science, public or otherwise. Technological applications cluster because one development is a prerequisite for another, as well as creating demand that immediately pushes successive applications into being. The availability of electricity in the late nineteenth century drove a search for applications for it, leading to a number of different inventors proudly brandishing light bulbs at the same tine.
It's still a tunnel at the bottom of a bay crossing a tectonic boundary. That takes the kind of engineering chutzpah that Californians - even Democrats - used to be capable of.
Years ago, BART in San Francisco was able to tunnel through the same tectonic plate boundary - underwater. A century ago, Switzerland built high tunnels through the Alps like the ones being contemplated here to connect Germany, France and Italy. But because those tunnels required trains to spiral up into the mountains to reach one end and then spiral down from from the other end of the tunnel, It is now driving a series of straight "base tunnels" underneath the entire range. These will allow bullet trains to rip through as though the Alps didn't exist.
While venting 500 wine bottle equivalents per second? Buddy, that's a hell of an open container! I'm going to have to change your orbit to bring you in at Guantánamo.
Slashdot Mirror
It's supposed to assure us that the medications we take are both safe and effective. In practice, we have seen approvals of compounds that later turn out to be dangerous (Vioxx) or ineffective, as in this case. Meanwhile, the glacial pace of the FDA approval process makes every drug we buy more expensive than it should be.
Time to make FDA ratings advisory, rather than mandatory. Let patients, doctors and insurance companies decide whether they want to stay with the gold standard of FDA-approved, or take a risk on something new and still in the pipeline, or use one of the many medications that are approved in Europe or Japan, but have not yet passed the FDA.
And no, there wouldn't be the explosion of quackery you fear. "Alternative medicines" are already exempt from FDA scrutiny as 'supplements', so that whole area would see no change.
"Why would anyone want to pay with a phone?"
Whenever you hand your credit card to a clerk, there is a possibility that it could be scammed. Your card information could go into the retailer's database, which can eventually be hacked, compromising millions of people at once.
Phone payment systems, on the other hand, can be set up so that only a one-time code gets transmitted to the retailer. It can't be used for anything after the one transaction, and there is nothing to store in a vulnerable database.
"The only things that group is against are taxes, regulation of industry, and punishment for white collar crime."
We're also against criminalizing bacon, which is why today's UN statement means war.
Interesting that you should mention Germany. I have spent a lot of time there visiting in-laws. Unfortunately the yammerhead form of environmentalists is dominant in German politics over any organism with brain cells, so the country is actually moving its power baseload from nuclear to coal - lignite, the one in-ground resource it has left, with the energy content and carbon profile of damp firewood. This requires digging the world's largest strip mine (Tagebau Garzweiler, soon to be succeeded by an even larger strip mine that will eventually top out at eighty-five square kilometers.
Meanwhile, massive feed-in tariffs (subsidies) have pushed German wind and solar to unprecedented build-out. Transporting power from the windy northern flats of Friesland to southerly markets requires a new transmission line called the Stromautobahn ("Power freeway"), which is being held up by the same Greens who promoted all that wind in the first place. No problem, though; just raise taxes a little more and surreptitiously buy more power from France.
I see another advantage. The airport thugs don't know that it can function as a laptop, so you van get away with leaving one of these in your bag, with the tablet you use as a screen. I love living in the future!
But by the time it was built, the Depression was biting deeply and the Republican Party had vanished entirely, not to return until the end of WW II brought a new set of issues to the political field. But fortunately, Thirties Democrats were the old can-do generation, not Boomers who reflexively oppose building anything significantly large. That's why the 2008 stimulus had to be frittered away on a miscellaneous host of projects too small to attract the attention of the Luddite lobby.
The euphemism they used, if you remember, was "shovel-ready." They knew that any attempt to build something on the scale of Hoover Dam today would cause most of the money to be spent on lawyers.
Your link describes a reinforcement project in the tunnel undertaken because it crosses a tectonic plate boundary underwater. In what way do you think it is not doing this?
All of the small renewable energy sources are location-dependent. Some places are sunny, others are windy, and occasionally you will find an old volcanic stump with residual geothermal heat. These sources will certainly help, especially in applications that can tolerate fluctuating power, such as charging EV batteries. But now what if your "smart environmentalists" are right about climate? If we really have to eliminate fossil sources in one generation, only nuclear will make up for the massive baseload we now have in coal and gas. The other sort of environmentalist answers, "All we have to do is get rid of energy-intensive industries and switch our economy over to software consultants and artisanal brewing?"
But the rest of us, and our creditors, would prefer to keep our day jobs.
But a real-time display of this value as a percentage of data cap, just like the battery usage indicator, is what would be really useful.
Gee, you mean I was just imagining the harridan hordes of Hollywood stars and hippie mothers who filed useless delaying lawsuits against every single nuclear plant and domestic gas well and every mile of road and rail, who ripped up fields of GMO produce, who even tried to stop NASA from launching the Galileo and Cassini probes on grounds they were "sending nuclear power into space"?
So why don't you people let us generate more of it? And let us build the electric alternative infrastructure, like the high-speed rail being described here, that would cut down on our use of petroleum.
"minimum speed of 80 mph in the right lane, and maximum speed of 200 mph in the passing lane. "
A car that is safe to drive at 200 mph is called a 'train'.
"To be fair, the 42 year delay was so that they could convince the people of Tennessee that electricity wasn't the work of the devil."
No, the time was spent vainly trying to convince liberals of that fact.
Argumentum ad pomum: that the other buy is not a corporate shill, but is such a fanboi that $EVIL_CORPORATION doesn't even have to pay him.
Once upon a time, socialists built Hoover Dam and the TVA, including a lot of projects that conservatives of the time opposed as being unnecessary spending. But during the Seventies, the political positions switched, with the children of the New Dealers relentlessly opposing every energy and transportation project proposed. California high-speed rail is just the latest.
Today, even pure scientific research is under attack. Now astronomy, the least polluting of the sciences, is being driven out of our country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The old observation that 'steam engines were invented when it was steam engine time' is not a reflection on basic science, public or otherwise. Technological applications cluster because one development is a prerequisite for another, as well as creating demand that immediately pushes successive applications into being. The availability of electricity in the late nineteenth century drove a search for applications for it, leading to a number of different inventors proudly brandishing light bulbs at the same tine.
It's still a tunnel at the bottom of a bay crossing a tectonic boundary. That takes the kind of engineering chutzpah that Californians - even Democrats - used to be capable of.
"Which is why generics are typically pretty affordable, except where there are not enough manufacturers competing"
And if a little-known generic becomes famous again, and in demand, guess what? People begin making it agin, and it becomes affordable.
On second thought, don't. He would probably enjoy it.
Moi aussi. Et les trains à grand vitesse japonaises!
Here's another one, in the heart of Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It would be nice to see socialists actually build something for a change, the way they did in the Thirties.
Years ago, BART in San Francisco was able to tunnel through the same tectonic plate boundary - underwater. A century ago, Switzerland built high tunnels through the Alps like the ones being contemplated here to connect Germany, France and Italy. But because those tunnels required trains to spiral up into the mountains to reach one end and then spiral down from from the other end of the tunnel, It is now driving a series of straight "base tunnels" underneath the entire range. These will allow bullet trains to rip through as though the Alps didn't exist.
And used the LED version of for their status indicators.
While venting 500 wine bottle equivalents per second? Buddy, that's a hell of an open container! I'm going to have to change your orbit to bring you in at Guantánamo.