Also in that the military has had a long history of fudging high profile, high tech tests, both for PR purposes and for information warfare purposes.
The Reagan administration rigged tests of the SDI missile defense system -- for example in one test they had a target missile broadcast a homing signal to assist the kill vehicle. When it came out a decade later officials claimed it was to fool the Soviet Union, not Congress.
More recently the Air Force and the Marines have declared the F35 ready for combat operations while it still has severe software limitations, issuing enthusiastic sounding but carefully equivocal statements (e.g. "We can use it right now if we need to).
China isn't spending money on stuff like this because they're too stupid to realize that the American private sector will deliver the technology if they just wait. They have their reasons.
The companies that you are calling "US Companies" have no real allegiance to the US. If all things were equal, they could just as well do the research in, say, Indonesia, which has almost the population of the US, or India, which is considerably larger. But neither of those have the America's massive research infrastructure, paid for by lavish cold war spending.
What China is doing here is priming the pump. If they can create a hotbed of advanced applied research in a field like AI, that will attract companies to put research facilities there.
Put yourself in China's shoes. They have over 4x the population of the US, so why shouldn't they be 4x more influential and powerful? But it won't happen by letting nature take its course.
Oh, there's incompetence here, but it's not the India that's the problem.
In my experience India has an incredible number of talented, capable people, but like talented capable people everywhere they cost more than ignoramuses. But even a country of a billion people has a finite pool of top-notch talent. On the other hand India does have an almost limitless supply of subpar talent, and Indian businessmen are enterprising to a fault. If a Western CEO jis willing to shell out good money for sub-par people, there's a killing to be made.
So who, exactly, is the fool in this scenario?
The British Airways debacle was an instance of a catastrophic failure being brought on by an unusually but statistically predictable event. Therefore, the new vendor the CEO brought in wasn't up to the job he hired them for. That's the CEO's fault, end of story.
The real problem is that people who are good at IT operations make their job look too easy. A fool looking at the lack of drama in a well-run data center is apt to mistake that for the job being easy.
Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine is published by Juniper Publishers, and Psychiatry and Mental Disorders is published by Austin Publishing, both on Beall's infamous list of predatory publishers.
If you don't know what a predatory publisher or journal is, it's basically a scheme to monetize the publication of fake or unpublishably bad science. Say you want to publish your vaccines cause autism paper; you pay a predatory journal a fee and they put your paper in the journal. To a layman who doesn't know what the real journals in the field, it looks indistinguishable from a genuine publication.
Bogus editorial boards are one of the key tipoffs that a journal is predatory. It's a hell of a lot of work to be on the editorial board of a real journal, and it's not easy to get invited to join the board of Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine. But if you look at the boards of predatory journals their editors are often on a ridiculous number of boards, more than a human being could handle.
Now if this guy got his dog on the editorial board of Lancet, that'd be stop the presses news: the sky would indeed be falling. But bogus is what bogus journals are in the business of.
While AC is not correct in attributing the varroosis susceptibility of honey bees to climate change (at least as far as temperate North America is concerned) it is not the mite infection per se that kills colonies but secondary viral infections that follow, like deformed wing virus. The ecological link, if any, of those viruses to climate change is at present unknown, at least as far as I've heard.
There *has* been a documented decline in native pollinators around the world. This is not a crisis *yet*, but given the importance of pollination it's a reasonable cause for long term concern. If you look at just bumblebees, it's clear that there isn't just one cause that's doing this. It's a bunch of things, like habitat loss, pesticide use, invasive species and infections.
Climate change is linked to some of these issues such as habitat loss and invasive species, although obviously it's not the sole cause of those things. Habitat disruption and invasive species in turn play a role in novel pathogen emergence. Pathogenic organisms often exist in a low level equilibrium with local hosts, only to spill out of a habitat when it comes in contract with a novel animal population, or the native population changes its range.
The bottom line is that anything that disrupts habitats on a large geographic scale is going to have consequences.
Do I want an internet that is neutral to content? Hell yes! Do I want it as a public utility that will get bogged down with a bureaucracy? Not only no, but HELL NO.
Someone old enough to remember the original PC here. CGA was not a standard feature; the base model (which most people had) used something called MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter), which supported text output only without any pixel-addressable graphics. Figures were "drawn" on the screen with special glyphs added to the 8 bit character set, allowing you to draw boxes around menus and the like by an ascii-art like process.
Almost nobody got CGA on the PC. Everyone opted for MDA because it was cheaper, there was't really any software that used color effectively, and monochrome monitors were cheaper and much, much sharper. On the output side graphics capable printers were very, very low quality (think 8 bit), and almost exclusively monochrome. The first kind of office printer most people got was something called a "daisy wheel" -- which produced output similar to an old-fashioned typewriter because essentially that's what it was.
So CGA for practical purposes might as well not have existed. When Lotus 1-2-3 came along, the need for plotting drove the adoption of a proprietary monochrome graphics technology called "Hercules Graphics Adapter", which was much, much more popular than CGA ever was. It wasn't until IBM introduced VGA as standard in its PS/2 line that color became a common feature.
As a side note, even then sound wasn't a standard feature on personal computers. The most they could do was beep. You had to add a proprietary sound card to get anything more. This is why Macintosh became common in schools. As a developer you could count on every Mac having the same set of very rudimentary capabilities. As a school administrator, you just unboxed the thing and fed it floppies; there was no opening the case and installing optional boards that had to have their address and interrupt vectors chosen by the user and configured by jumpers.
Oh, well, sign me up for the genius class, once you figure out how to teach people to be geniuses.
Until then, if you want to become world class, your best bet is to work with the best in the world.
In practical terms, it means if you want a world-building team you don't necessarily have to hunt across the world for every member; but you do want to build it around the most accomplished people you can find, wherever they might be. Then you let them "train up" the talented locals, rather than have ordinary mortals like you or me try to do it.
American postwar technological supremacy was largely built this way, with refugee talent from WW2 (or in the case of Werner von Braun and his team, Nazis we snatched before the Russians could scoop them up). Some of the Jewish scientists we got from Germany were literally worth more than their weight in gold. It's not that native-born Americans weren't crucial for achieving most of what we did, but they became world class because they had advantages in their colleagues and teachers. Even in the 1970s when I attended MIT, many of the senior professors there were war refugees.
If it were about talent, then you'd reduce the number who come in on the visa, and also reduce the number that are kicked out by the visa retiring. It makes *no* sense to kick someone out who you brought in for his talent when you say you have a shortage of talent.
Really, it's just a program to facilitate offshoring.
Now I've worked with a number of H-1Bs, and some of them really are very talented and skilled, and bring a lot of value to the country. But others have pretty much rudimentary, commodity skills and don't do anything for the country but reduce wages for our own mediocre workers.
Sure, if by "same as" you mean that you can place them along some common continuum. In particular, the relevant continuum here runs from "medium of exchange" (US Dollars) to "asset" (Gold).
Currency is something you own to buy things with. An asset is something you own because you think it will appreciate in value.
That doesn't mean you can't buy things with assets; you could in principle walk into a dealership and buy a car with your baseball collection, if the collection were good enough and the dealer knowledgeable about such things. But that doesn't make baseball cards currency.
Currency is managed by central banks to have a predictable value over the short-to-mid-term. This takes an element of timing out of purchase and sale decisions. If I want to buy something, I neither wait because I think my dollars are going to be worth much more in a few months, nor do I hurry to get rid of them because I think they'll be worth much less. The slight bias towards long term value loss (inflation) over years in most currencies is meant to keep you putting your money to work rather than stuffing it in a mattress for years.
So news of a dramatic spike in Bitcoin value doesn't really validate the concept of Bitcoin as a currency, although it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't invest in Bitcoin. I suspect that any cryptocurrency system which takes a central authority out of the picture will necessarily have volatile value over the short term. Maybe we could learn to live with that though.
... and yet leaking is almost never punished, much less prosecuted.
If you want to see why, look at one of the few cases of leaking that *was* prosecuted: Scooter Libby's leaking of the fact Valerie Plame was an active CIA agent. Note that his sentence was commuted by the president he served.
That's because despite leaking being characterized as disloyal, often it's the exact opposite. I'm not just talking about planted information, I'm talking about leaks that arise out of internal differences in strategy and policy. The insiders who do this aren't trying to sabotage the administration, they're trying to steer it using public pressure. And while embarrassment is often part of that pressure, leaks by insiders are usually carefully measured to limit damage. And given the infrequency with which they are punished I have to assume that insider are also careful about choosing their battles.
What's coming out of the Trump Administration feels different, more disloyal, and gratuitously embarrassing. It smacks of people out to personally undermine their colleagues.
Supermarket tomatoes are largely descended from a mutant discovered in the 1920s which ripened to a uniform red instead of with splotches of green. This produced a very attractive tomato, but with a drawback: it crippled the fruit's photosynthetic capability, resulting in a blander tomato.
Add to this the fact that tomatoes are picked green for ease of shipping and then artificially "ripened" by exposure to ethylene. Ethylene triggers the softening of the tomato and the development of the red carotenoid pigments, but because the tomato has no source of energy the taste doesn't change very much.
Now the changes mentioned in the article are neither here nor there from the point of view of taste. Anyone who's grown tomatoes knows you want to prune late season growth and flowers, so the vine puts the energy into the fruits your going to harvest rather than making lots of useless half-grown fruit. This should, all things being equal, produce better fruit, but it will still have the taste of a Styrofoam ball if you pick it green.
Actually it wasn't a joke involving homosexuality at all -- at least not the whole phenomenon. It's about one thing that homosexuals happen to do.
Fellatio is sometimes performed between men who do not identify as homosexual -- e.g. in prison, boarding schools and other male-only situations -- and who don't take part in same sex relations outside those circumstances. In such situations it often denotes a dominance/submission relationship, which is what the joke is alluding to.
Of course you could argue that anyone who ever engages in a "homosexual act" is a "homosexual", but that's quibbling over definitions; if you define homosexuality that way, then it's clear that the kind that takes place in prison is very different from being a friend of Dorothy.
An under-sink filter will remove all of the organic-related taste.
RO is overkill; humans evolved to drink natural water sources with trace minerals in them, so unless you have a specific problem like arsenic contamination or exteremely hard water RO is not doing yourself any favors. Water with moderate mineral content is usually perceived as tasting better than completely pure water.
As for fluoride, it's one of the most common minerals in the Earth's crust and found as a trace mineral in most surface water. The level of fluoride added to US water brings the concentration up to 0.7ppm, which is higher than most (but not all) natural sources in the US, but well within the range found naturally across the world.
Now try it at 160 kilopascaals partial pressure...
I thought not. Dose makes the poison. Life on Earth evolved to to tolerate, make use of, and in many cases depend on high levels of free O2, but those levels of O2 are a byproduct of life itself. It's conceivable that complex life on other planets could evolve to use some kind of fermentation, although the forms of fermentation familiar on Earth (alcohol and lactic acid) require bound oxygen.
I log everything I eat... because I'm a data geek. Then one day I noticed I was getting something like only 20% of the potassium I needed. Potassium has a huge number of roles in the body, so being low on it is not good.
So I decided that I'd try to get 100% of the 4700 mg a day you supposedly need, and it's hard. Even supplements typically only contain something like 3% of your RDA. Bananas contain only about 9% of your RDA; even so they're one of the highest potassium common foods. You'd have to eat 11 a day to get the 4700 mg, but that beats taking 33 potassium gluconate pills.
In fact, getting enough potassium is sufficiently tough (and impractical to get through supplementation), you could almost use potassium intake as an overall proxy for dietary quality. I eat a lot of bananas -- typically three or four a day, but I have to eat a huge variety of high potassium foods to hit my target; you can't do it on a single food unless you want to eat ten cups of beans or thirteen cups of yogurt a day. Avocados, when you can get one ripe, are packed with potassium -- almost a thousand gram of it apiece.
You say "purity and packaging" as if it's no big deal. It's a very big deal for something you're going to inject into someone's bloodstream. Take some common fungal spores which might not even count as contamination in food, inject them into patients and you could be facing horrific medical consequences on a massive scale.
I thought it was interesting the author didn't mention the similarity to the Obama logo. Hillary's logo had a strong family resemblance to that.
If you go back for the past few presidential elections, campaign logos take standard form: the presidential and vp candidate's names decorated with graphical elements borrowed from the flag. Obama's campaign logo was designed by a an actual branding company, and they chose to turn his initial into a kind of brand mark. Hillary copied this, and it had to be conscious because it's not the usual way.
Now you may personally hate Obama, but it's hard to deny he's an extremely accomplished campaigner. Both times out he ran remarkably slick, tech-savvy operations. In retrospect, Hillary Clinton's campaign had a kind of cargo cult feel to it, trying to recapture what Obama accomplished by copying the novel things he did.
What she never did was match Obama's mastery of the traditional methods of campaigning, not that that would be easy. There few were better at it than Obama. Reagan, sure. Maybe Bill Clinton. You've got to be able to go out twenty or more times a week with the same old stump speech and fire up a crowd. You've got command attention; to drive the narrative of the campaign, or at the very least not fade into the background because all eyes are on your opponent, even if that's for the wrong reasons.
In the end it may have been Hillary's over-reliance on analytics that doomed her candidacy. The numbers said she didn't need to campaign in certain swing states, and she let the numbers overrule the human intelligence she was getting from those places.
I wonder whether her consciousness of her weakness on the stump may have influenced this decision. But even if you're a lousy at tub-thumping, showing up to ask for someone's vote counts for a lot.
You make this sound as if it is unusual -- but it's not really. Papers are discredited all the time, and it doesn't even mean they are bad papers.
When a question arises, papers are typically published on both sides of the question, and both sides of the question can't be right. Therefore peer review doesn't mean that a paper's position is correct or true, only that it's not trivially dismissable given the current state of knowledge. And that's how the state of knowledge advances, not just with brilliant, seminal papers that redefine the field in one stroke, but a through a cut-and-thrust process that sifts through existing evidence and generates new evidence.
This is why it is a bad idea for a layman to put any kind of trust in any one study, until long after that study has stood the test of time. Peer review can't tell you whether a paper is right, in fact it's not supposed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate change politics are increasingly about wealth redistribution.
Truer words were never said, particularly by someone with so little grasp of the truth.
Also in that the military has had a long history of fudging high profile, high tech tests, both for PR purposes and for information warfare purposes.
The Reagan administration rigged tests of the SDI missile defense system -- for example in one test they had a target missile broadcast a homing signal to assist the kill vehicle. When it came out a decade later officials claimed it was to fool the Soviet Union, not Congress.
More recently the Air Force and the Marines have declared the F35 ready for combat operations while it still has severe software limitations, issuing enthusiastic sounding but carefully equivocal statements (e.g. "We can use it right now if we need to).
Indonesia? No. Yeah, they have population, but no infrastructure, little education,
Which is exactly my point.
China isn't spending money on stuff like this because they're too stupid to realize that the American private sector will deliver the technology if they just wait. They have their reasons.
The companies that you are calling "US Companies" have no real allegiance to the US. If all things were equal, they could just as well do the research in, say, Indonesia, which has almost the population of the US, or India, which is considerably larger. But neither of those have the America's massive research infrastructure, paid for by lavish cold war spending.
What China is doing here is priming the pump. If they can create a hotbed of advanced applied research in a field like AI, that will attract companies to put research facilities there.
Put yourself in China's shoes. They have over 4x the population of the US, so why shouldn't they be 4x more influential and powerful? But it won't happen by letting nature take its course.
Oh, there's incompetence here, but it's not the India that's the problem.
In my experience India has an incredible number of talented, capable people, but like talented capable people everywhere they cost more than ignoramuses. But even a country of a billion people has a finite pool of top-notch talent. On the other hand India does have an almost limitless supply of subpar talent, and Indian businessmen are enterprising to a fault. If a Western CEO jis willing to shell out good money for sub-par people, there's a killing to be made.
So who, exactly, is the fool in this scenario?
The British Airways debacle was an instance of a catastrophic failure being brought on by an unusually but statistically predictable event. Therefore, the new vendor the CEO brought in wasn't up to the job he hired them for. That's the CEO's fault, end of story.
The real problem is that people who are good at IT operations make their job look too easy. A fool looking at the lack of drama in a well-run data center is apt to mistake that for the job being easy.
Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine is published by Juniper Publishers, and Psychiatry and Mental Disorders is published by Austin Publishing, both on Beall's infamous list of predatory publishers.
If you don't know what a predatory publisher or journal is, it's basically a scheme to monetize the publication of fake or unpublishably bad science. Say you want to publish your vaccines cause autism paper; you pay a predatory journal a fee and they put your paper in the journal. To a layman who doesn't know what the real journals in the field, it looks indistinguishable from a genuine publication.
Bogus editorial boards are one of the key tipoffs that a journal is predatory. It's a hell of a lot of work to be on the editorial board of a real journal, and it's not easy to get invited to join the board of Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine. But if you look at the boards of predatory journals their editors are often on a ridiculous number of boards, more than a human being could handle.
Now if this guy got his dog on the editorial board of Lancet, that'd be stop the presses news: the sky would indeed be falling. But bogus is what bogus journals are in the business of.
"Defective by design" is another way of saying the vendor and client have conflicting interests in their requirements for the product.
While AC is not correct in attributing the varroosis susceptibility of honey bees to climate change (at least as far as temperate North America is concerned) it is not the mite infection per se that kills colonies but secondary viral infections that follow, like deformed wing virus. The ecological link, if any, of those viruses to climate change is at present unknown, at least as far as I've heard.
There *has* been a documented decline in native pollinators around the world. This is not a crisis *yet*, but given the importance of pollination it's a reasonable cause for long term concern. If you look at just bumblebees, it's clear that there isn't just one cause that's doing this. It's a bunch of things, like habitat loss, pesticide use, invasive species and infections.
Climate change is linked to some of these issues such as habitat loss and invasive species, although obviously it's not the sole cause of those things. Habitat disruption and invasive species in turn play a role in novel pathogen emergence. Pathogenic organisms often exist in a low level equilibrium with local hosts, only to spill out of a habitat when it comes in contract with a novel animal population, or the native population changes its range.
The bottom line is that anything that disrupts habitats on a large geographic scale is going to have consequences.
Do I want an internet that is neutral to content? Hell yes! Do I want it as a public utility that will get bogged down with a bureaucracy? Not only no, but HELL NO.
Do I engage in false dichotomies? HELL YES.
I remember the Altair too. You had to wire it up yourself.
Someone old enough to remember the original PC here. CGA was not a standard feature; the base model (which most people had) used something called MDA (Monochrome Display Adapter), which supported text output only without any pixel-addressable graphics. Figures were "drawn" on the screen with special glyphs added to the 8 bit character set, allowing you to draw boxes around menus and the like by an ascii-art like process.
Almost nobody got CGA on the PC. Everyone opted for MDA because it was cheaper, there was't really any software that used color effectively, and monochrome monitors were cheaper and much, much sharper. On the output side graphics capable printers were very, very low quality (think 8 bit), and almost exclusively monochrome. The first kind of office printer most people got was something called a "daisy wheel" -- which produced output similar to an old-fashioned typewriter because essentially that's what it was.
So CGA for practical purposes might as well not have existed. When Lotus 1-2-3 came along, the need for plotting drove the adoption of a proprietary monochrome graphics technology called "Hercules Graphics Adapter", which was much, much more popular than CGA ever was. It wasn't until IBM introduced VGA as standard in its PS/2 line that color became a common feature.
As a side note, even then sound wasn't a standard feature on personal computers. The most they could do was beep. You had to add a proprietary sound card to get anything more. This is why Macintosh became common in schools. As a developer you could count on every Mac having the same set of very rudimentary capabilities. As a school administrator, you just unboxed the thing and fed it floppies; there was no opening the case and installing optional boards that had to have their address and interrupt vectors chosen by the user and configured by jumpers.
Oh, well, sign me up for the genius class, once you figure out how to teach people to be geniuses.
Until then, if you want to become world class, your best bet is to work with the best in the world.
In practical terms, it means if you want a world-building team you don't necessarily have to hunt across the world for every member; but you do want to build it around the most accomplished people you can find, wherever they might be. Then you let them "train up" the talented locals, rather than have ordinary mortals like you or me try to do it.
American postwar technological supremacy was largely built this way, with refugee talent from WW2 (or in the case of Werner von Braun and his team, Nazis we snatched before the Russians could scoop them up). Some of the Jewish scientists we got from Germany were literally worth more than their weight in gold. It's not that native-born Americans weren't crucial for achieving most of what we did, but they became world class because they had advantages in their colleagues and teachers. Even in the 1970s when I attended MIT, many of the senior professors there were war refugees.
If it were about talent, then you'd reduce the number who come in on the visa, and also reduce the number that are kicked out by the visa retiring. It makes *no* sense to kick someone out who you brought in for his talent when you say you have a shortage of talent.
Really, it's just a program to facilitate offshoring.
Now I've worked with a number of H-1Bs, and some of them really are very talented and skilled, and bring a lot of value to the country. But others have pretty much rudimentary, commodity skills and don't do anything for the country but reduce wages for our own mediocre workers.
Sure, if by "same as" you mean that you can place them along some common continuum. In particular, the relevant continuum here runs from "medium of exchange" (US Dollars) to "asset" (Gold).
Currency is something you own to buy things with. An asset is something you own because you think it will appreciate in value.
That doesn't mean you can't buy things with assets; you could in principle walk into a dealership and buy a car with your baseball collection, if the collection were good enough and the dealer knowledgeable about such things. But that doesn't make baseball cards currency.
Currency is managed by central banks to have a predictable value over the short-to-mid-term. This takes an element of timing out of purchase and sale decisions. If I want to buy something, I neither wait because I think my dollars are going to be worth much more in a few months, nor do I hurry to get rid of them because I think they'll be worth much less. The slight bias towards long term value loss (inflation) over years in most currencies is meant to keep you putting your money to work rather than stuffing it in a mattress for years.
So news of a dramatic spike in Bitcoin value doesn't really validate the concept of Bitcoin as a currency, although it doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't invest in Bitcoin. I suspect that any cryptocurrency system which takes a central authority out of the picture will necessarily have volatile value over the short term. Maybe we could learn to live with that though.
... and yet leaking is almost never punished, much less prosecuted.
If you want to see why, look at one of the few cases of leaking that *was* prosecuted: Scooter Libby's leaking of the fact Valerie Plame was an active CIA agent. Note that his sentence was commuted by the president he served.
That's because despite leaking being characterized as disloyal, often it's the exact opposite. I'm not just talking about planted information, I'm talking about leaks that arise out of internal differences in strategy and policy. The insiders who do this aren't trying to sabotage the administration, they're trying to steer it using public pressure. And while embarrassment is often part of that pressure, leaks by insiders are usually carefully measured to limit damage. And given the infrequency with which they are punished I have to assume that insider are also careful about choosing their battles.
What's coming out of the Trump Administration feels different, more disloyal, and gratuitously embarrassing. It smacks of people out to personally undermine their colleagues.
Supermarket tomatoes are largely descended from a mutant discovered in the 1920s which ripened to a uniform red instead of with splotches of green. This produced a very attractive tomato, but with a drawback: it crippled the fruit's photosynthetic capability, resulting in a blander tomato.
Add to this the fact that tomatoes are picked green for ease of shipping and then artificially "ripened" by exposure to ethylene. Ethylene triggers the softening of the tomato and the development of the red carotenoid pigments, but because the tomato has no source of energy the taste doesn't change very much.
Now the changes mentioned in the article are neither here nor there from the point of view of taste. Anyone who's grown tomatoes knows you want to prune late season growth and flowers, so the vine puts the energy into the fruits your going to harvest rather than making lots of useless half-grown fruit. This should, all things being equal, produce better fruit, but it will still have the taste of a Styrofoam ball if you pick it green.
I have to say it is a lazy joke, and in bad taste, which are more or less the same thing. But it's not homophobic.
I use just one app on my smartphone, unfortunately it's a total privacy bitch: Google Maps. Even if you don't turn on location services.
Actually it wasn't a joke involving homosexuality at all -- at least not the whole phenomenon. It's about one thing that homosexuals happen to do.
Fellatio is sometimes performed between men who do not identify as homosexual -- e.g. in prison, boarding schools and other male-only situations -- and who don't take part in same sex relations outside those circumstances. In such situations it often denotes a dominance/submission relationship, which is what the joke is alluding to.
Of course you could argue that anyone who ever engages in a "homosexual act" is a "homosexual", but that's quibbling over definitions; if you define homosexuality that way, then it's clear that the kind that takes place in prison is very different from being a friend of Dorothy.
An under-sink filter will remove all of the organic-related taste.
RO is overkill; humans evolved to drink natural water sources with trace minerals in them, so unless you have a specific problem like arsenic contamination or exteremely hard water RO is not doing yourself any favors. Water with moderate mineral content is usually perceived as tasting better than completely pure water.
As for fluoride, it's one of the most common minerals in the Earth's crust and found as a trace mineral in most surface water. The level of fluoride added to US water brings the concentration up to 0.7ppm, which is higher than most (but not all) natural sources in the US, but well within the range found naturally across the world.
*Takes deep breath*
Bring it on.
Now try it at 160 kilopascaals partial pressure...
I thought not. Dose makes the poison. Life on Earth evolved to to tolerate, make use of, and in many cases depend on high levels of free O2, but those levels of O2 are a byproduct of life itself. It's conceivable that complex life on other planets could evolve to use some kind of fermentation, although the forms of fermentation familiar on Earth (alcohol and lactic acid) require bound oxygen.
I log everything I eat... because I'm a data geek. Then one day I noticed I was getting something like only 20% of the potassium I needed. Potassium has a huge number of roles in the body, so being low on it is not good.
So I decided that I'd try to get 100% of the 4700 mg a day you supposedly need, and it's hard. Even supplements typically only contain something like 3% of your RDA. Bananas contain only about 9% of your RDA; even so they're one of the highest potassium common foods. You'd have to eat 11 a day to get the 4700 mg, but that beats taking 33 potassium gluconate pills.
In fact, getting enough potassium is sufficiently tough (and impractical to get through supplementation), you could almost use potassium intake as an overall proxy for dietary quality. I eat a lot of bananas -- typically three or four a day, but I have to eat a huge variety of high potassium foods to hit my target; you can't do it on a single food unless you want to eat ten cups of beans or thirteen cups of yogurt a day. Avocados, when you can get one ripe, are packed with potassium -- almost a thousand gram of it apiece.
You say "purity and packaging" as if it's no big deal. It's a very big deal for something you're going to inject into someone's bloodstream. Take some common fungal spores which might not even count as contamination in food, inject them into patients and you could be facing horrific medical consequences on a massive scale.
I thought it was interesting the author didn't mention the similarity to the Obama logo. Hillary's logo had a strong family resemblance to that.
If you go back for the past few presidential elections, campaign logos take standard form: the presidential and vp candidate's names decorated with graphical elements borrowed from the flag. Obama's campaign logo was designed by a an actual branding company, and they chose to turn his initial into a kind of brand mark. Hillary copied this, and it had to be conscious because it's not the usual way.
Now you may personally hate Obama, but it's hard to deny he's an extremely accomplished campaigner. Both times out he ran remarkably slick, tech-savvy operations. In retrospect, Hillary Clinton's campaign had a kind of cargo cult feel to it, trying to recapture what Obama accomplished by copying the novel things he did.
What she never did was match Obama's mastery of the traditional methods of campaigning, not that that would be easy. There few were better at it than Obama. Reagan, sure. Maybe Bill Clinton. You've got to be able to go out twenty or more times a week with the same old stump speech and fire up a crowd. You've got command attention; to drive the narrative of the campaign, or at the very least not fade into the background because all eyes are on your opponent, even if that's for the wrong reasons.
In the end it may have been Hillary's over-reliance on analytics that doomed her candidacy. The numbers said she didn't need to campaign in certain swing states, and she let the numbers overrule the human intelligence she was getting from those places.
I wonder whether her consciousness of her weakness on the stump may have influenced this decision. But even if you're a lousy at tub-thumping, showing up to ask for someone's vote counts for a lot.
You make this sound as if it is unusual -- but it's not really. Papers are discredited all the time, and it doesn't even mean they are bad papers.
When a question arises, papers are typically published on both sides of the question, and both sides of the question can't be right. Therefore peer review doesn't mean that a paper's position is correct or true, only that it's not trivially dismissable given the current state of knowledge. And that's how the state of knowledge advances, not just with brilliant, seminal papers that redefine the field in one stroke, but a through a cut-and-thrust process that sifts through existing evidence and generates new evidence.
This is why it is a bad idea for a layman to put any kind of trust in any one study, until long after that study has stood the test of time. Peer review can't tell you whether a paper is right, in fact it's not supposed to.