No placebos do not work. They are the very definition of not working. There is a reason we use placebos as the control group when doing double blind tests. The placebo effect is real but the placebos by definition have no medicinal effect whatsoever.
Placebos are used as a control group not because "they don't work", but because a drug that works no better than a placebo has no additional benefit. If I ask you whether you prefer to get $110 from me or $100 and you choose the $110, that doesn't mean that the offer of $100 was worthless.
Placebos do have their occasional use as a therapy but homeopathy is for all practical purposes a placebo sold at a huge markup to stupid people.
Yes, and one way doctors use placebos is through homeopathy. How else do you think they can convince a patient to take a placebo?
The problem with labelling something no better than a placebo as "healthcare" is that people who could benefit from real treatments can be led to use a placebo as a replacement for actual effective treatments; if the placebos don't work, they may have just aggravated the health issue by delaying real treatment.
Many "real treatments" are actually only moderately better than placebos and come with significant side effects; yet placebos are often much better than no treatment at all. The problem with eliminating placebos as a treatment option is then that you remove something that can be safe and effective in many cases. If you entrust doctors with the option of prescribing real drugs, you should also entrust them with the option of prescribing homeopathic remedies.
If your medical doctor wants to prescribe a placebo, fine, but make sure you go to a real doctor for that.
But that's what homeopathy is: "you know, I think the best option in your case would be a homeopathic treatment." That's the only option. They can't prescribe you sugar pills like they use in double blind studies, because they can't actually lie to you about what's in the drugs they give you. If the FDA takes homeopatic medicines off the market, as TFA suggests, doctors have almost no viable options for placebos left.
Whether he is serious or not, right or wrong doesn't matter. People should have the right to make their own choices, even if those choices are unscientific.
Going to a homeopath meant that you weren't getting killed by establishment medicine.
That is actually still the case. Establishment medicine still often does a lot more harm than good.
Anyway, homeopathy was an historically important safe place, whose time has come and gone.
I think it's still valuable: there are many diseases for which drugs aren't much more effective than placebos and have serious side effects. Being able to prescribe a believable but harmless placebo is a useful option for doctors to have. Without homeopathic medicines, doctors are left with either telling the patient to go away without any kind of treatment (sacrificing the placebo effect), or trying to give active drugs with potential side effects.
"Homeopathy is perhaps the most obviously absurd medical pseudoscience. It is also widely studied, and has been clearly shown to not work. Homeopathy is a placebo
Placebos often work quite well compared to doing nothing. I have always viewed homeopathy as a good way for doctors to prescribe placebos when that was the medically best option. I think it's a shame that this option is being taken away.
Not the way it's being done today, no. It hasn't been "persuasion" since about 1960.
Really? In what way does marketing "coerce" me to do anything?
That would be an interesting point if Al Gore was the only person talking about climate change.
I didn't single out Al Gore, you did. You put him out there as an example, and I simply explained how he benefits from climate change activism, since you don't seem to be able to figure it out yourself.
If you want to discuss the subsidies to the oil industry,
What's there to discuss? Subsidies to the oil industry are just another instance of the same b.s. you advocate: someone goes to the government and says "hey, look how big this problem is, give us tax dollars to fix it!" Not only is it the same kind of political corruption, often it's even literally the same companies, receiving tax dollars to pump oil out of the ground, and receiving even more tax dollars to limit CO2 emissions. How do you feel about advocating shoving even more money in the hands of big oil companies?
You are really stupid. Off to the Fox News Sin Bin with you.
I think we have already established that you are the angry old lefty who spends his days shouting at Fox News. I really have no idea what the latest Fox News gossip is, but having people like you inform me about it certainly is a "teaching moment".
The tricky bit is that greenhouse gas emissions are a classic negative externality
The tricky bit is that we don't know what greenhouse gas emissions are or to who. They might well be positive externalities to many people, at least in the long run.
Pigovian taxation has the advantage of letting the private sector work out the details of the technology
And it has the disadvantage that it is subject to massive rent seeking and regulatory capture; that it doesn't compensate the people who suffer the negative externalities; and that nobody knows how to set the tax rates. That's exactly what we're seeing with the carbon taxes.
Marketing is the science of coercing people to live differently.
No, marketing is the science of persuading people to choose to live differently; in the end, it's your free choice what you spend your money on. The only people who can coerce you to do anything are criminals and the government.
Please tell us how people addressing climate change are acting out of "greed and self interest".
Please tell us how getting government subsidies to develop products that otherwise nobody wants, or making massive commissions off carbon trading, is not acting out of greed and self interest.
And if you bring up Al Gore's private jet, you have to spend 10 minutes in the Fox News penalty box.
I didn't even know Al Gore has a private jet, thanks for telling me. Maybe I should start watching Fox News like you apparently do.
In any case, yes, Al Gore is acting out of greed and self interest; without "climate change" as his hobby horse, the guy would be utterly irrelevant.
The US is the only country I' m aware of where most urban areas are mandated to...
I agree that the urban development policies, land use restrictions, and zoning laws are harmful to both people and the environment; they largely represent the financial interests of existing, usually well-off property owners. (But, no, the US is far from the only country.)
Most state and counties currently force them to waste dollars on supporting huge amounts of infrastructure that offer little value to them.
I agree that that is wrong too. People should pay for what they use and not be forced to subsidize inefficient lifestyles. I don't know, though, how those subsidies work out. Urban infrastructure is heavily subsidized (long range transmission of power, water, etc.). Suburban and rural infrastructure is subsidized too, but in different ways. Although it is a popular meme that city living is efficient, I think that doesn't account for a lot of hidden costs and externalities.
Change that, and give developers more freedom to build what people actually want... because I'm proposing offering a choice of living more efficiently, and that... I don't know... will make people who still choose to live in the middle of nowhere feel bad or something?
I think you'll find that the great majority of people past their mid-30's actually prefer the suburbs or the country, and if they live in a city or near a city, they'd prefer a single family home with a yard to a condo. I think liberalizing the housing market and reducing regulation would bring down costs everywhere, but I think by and large, Americans live roughly where they want to live anyway.
Or the selfish Aynn Rand style would be to give out condoms in the 3rd world.
Condoms don't prevent population growth, economic development does.
If the population is in half we could all buy our gas guzzling SUV's, use water and electricity, and still have a cleaner earth and cheaper gas prices and rents/mortgages.
If the population were cut in half, you couldn't afford an SUV or a computer. But if you want to experience what earth like that would be like, you can do that today: move to the middle of nowhere, in the US or elsewhere: cheap land, few jobs.
How many who whine about global warming and oil companies are willing to take a bus to work or ride a bike 4 hours each way? No hands I see...
I bike to work every day and live a low carbon footprint life. I do that because I'm selfish.
but you are using the (possibly true) equivalent between two stances on 'what other people should do to solve this problem' to advance a false equivalence that those two proposals will work similarly well
My point is about coercion, not about what is being coerced. Yes, technology works better than religion. But coerced solutions cause much more harm than voluntary solutions.
We've had much better luck with technological solutions that try to avoid stepping in the quagmire of moral suasion;
Technological solutions that are adopted voluntarily are good; technological solutions mandated and subsidized by government frequently have a horrendous track record.
So he puts the blame on economics and consumerism. But the solution to climate change is not to moralize from on high and implore people—particularly the poor people whom he claims to sympathize with—to learn to be abstemious for the common good
That is no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways of addressing climate change. "Global carbon tax and investment in the development of new energy technologies" are as self-serving, irrational, and unrealistic as what the Pope is proposing.
Notice how everybody who proposes ways of addressing climate change agrees that people need to be coerced to live differently, but that only their own approach is selfless and benign while everybody else acts out of greed and self-interest.
Seems to be working okay. My country (The Netherlands) is consistently in the top happy countries, definitely near the top healthy countries.
The Netherlands is a wealthy enclave at the northern edge of Europe that is still reaping the benefits of its colonialist past and isolating itself through language and culture. And for every Netherlands, there is a Greece in the EU. If you want to make meaningful comparisons, start by comparing the EU as a whole to the US.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that European countries are communist.
I'm under no "misapprehensions" about Europe because I'm originally from Europe. However, being from Europe, I have a pretty good idea what your misapprehensions are. If you think that anybody can mistake Europe for "communist", you really have no idea what communism is. No, Europe is statist and stagnant, which is much worse because it is so insidious.
Unless she has a super-special deal (which, who knows, with her market power she might), she makes way more off touring and related merchandising than she does the pitiful royalties from album (both physical & virtual) sales.
Of course, that also means that iTunes is more like a shared marketing agreement, and by making it more difficult for less successful artists to make an attractive deal with Apple for their own marketing, she actually is proposing to hurt them.
I'm sure they are free to cancel their contract with Apple any time. Of course, Taylor Swift wouldn't even exist without iTunes, so she is reluctant to do that. And the fact that Apple is in this bargaining position is really the result of choices that artists made earlier, namely signing up with Apple rather than signing up with a larger variety of companies.
The correct thing to do would be for people like Taylor Swift to cancel their contracts with Apple and sign up with other music services. That would encourage free market competition.
The wrong thing to do would be for antitrust regulators to step in and give people like Swift what they want. That's not because I begrudge Taylor Swift her millions (talentless as she may be), but because it would effectively enshrine Apple and a few other companies as government-regulated monopolies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard [wikipedia.org] -- that's what is wrong with this model
This is no "moral hazard" because this is a voluntary transaction between two private parties. Taylor Swift is free to take the deal or leave it, depending on how she sees the risks and benefits.
If Apple is going to invest in developing is new service, then 100% of the investment cost needs to come from Apple.
You're saying that if I and a bunch of musician friends want to develop a new streaming service for some niche market, you want to prohibit them from letting me use their music for free to get the service started in return for larger royalty payments later?
It's people like you and thinking like yours that creates the big, monopolistic corporations that we have.
Hey, Taylor Swift, you aren't going to get much money out of Apple by complaining about how they license and sell music.
But have you considered suing them over the "Swift" language? Obviously, they are using your trademarked good name in order to sell their new language, and you can probably get a well-deserved buck out of them so that you don't have to starve.
I'd be interested in a comparison of what percent of that spending directly benefits the intended recipient.
I don't know what that means, but welfare payments are generally much lower, and there are almost no in-kind benefits like food stamps.
Also, healthcare is a big area of public benefit spending in Europe, but costs are much lower there.
Costs are much lower because services are limited and prices are fixed (resulting in shortages). And health and life expectancy may well be (slightly) better because people receive less medical care.
I don't think you can measure the strength of social programs merely in the amount of money spent.
Indeed, you can't. I just gave you the overall number as a summary. You have to do a lot more research to figure out what's going on on the ground. There is a lot of crappy writing by hysterical left and right wingers, but there are some decent and well-reasoned analyses, like this one: http://www.spiegel.de/internat... (I'm not endorsing everything it says, but it's a good start).
I have fairly conservative fiscal views. I think it would actually be great if the US adopted a German-style welfare system and a German-style health care system. It would greatly simplify our systems and greatly lower costs. But progressives in the US don't allow it to happen because it would result in massive cuts in benefits and two-tiered systems for the rich vs. everybody else; instead, they keep proclaiming the fiction that "Europe" has better benefits than the US with less spending.
Your comments just demonstrate your utter and complete ignorance. Really, people like you make me embarrassed to be a European. Crawl back into the ignorant chauvinist hole you crawled out of.
The problem with the US is that our social programs are even weaker than in Europe,
The idea that US social programs are weak is a fiction. Government social expenditure in the US is 20% of GDP, which is roughly in the middle of the OECD and Europe. But given that US per capita GDP is significantly higher than that of most European nations, that actually puts us near the top in terms of per capita government social spending. And that isn't even counting the massive US non-profit sector.
And further to what the parent poster said, there is the issue of whether Silicon Valley is really any "better" when you consider the number of FAILED companies it has produced. I think the Europeans are a lot smarter about their investments than North Americans;
Rational investors are concerned with risk and return. If you let considerations of the number of failed companies override risk and return considerations, you aren't smarter, you are dumb.
Especially when you consider the fact that you don't even need to fuss around with multi-byte character sets to support English.
Whenever there's those OECD comparisons about things that I value: happiness, standard of living, access to health and education, low violent crime etc then North Western Europe along with Australia and New Zealand blitz those things every time.
The US generally comes out near the top. But those numbers are dubious to begin with: high happiness numbers don't actually mean that people are happy, high voter turnout is not a good measure of civic engagement, staying longest in school is not necessarily a good thing, and high life expectancy and government-paid health care are not necessarily good measures of a good medical system. And comparing the US as a whole against individual EU member nations makes little sense either.
Who gets to be the judge of what is the correct level of compensation? It could be said that better-equality jurisdictions are better at fighting the "superstar effect", thereby creating correct compensation.
It doesn't matter what delusions you have about "correct" compensation. If Europe pays "superstars" less than they get paid in the US, then the superstars leave, because other countries are willing to pay them market rates. Or if they don't leave for the US, they simply don't work as hard, because what's the point of working hard if you get compensated pretty much as well with less effort?
Besides, the most unequal areas in the world are the least innovative. You'd be surprised how egalitarian Silicon Valley is compared to 99% of Asia or South America.
Difficult as that may be to understand, inequality can have multiple causes and doesn't follow the simplistic relationship you assume. In particular, poorly developed and highly developed nations both have high inequality. Furthermore, what matters here isn't the natural level of inequality that Europe has, but the fact that government policies attempt to reduce it.
Slashdot Mirror
Animal horns have intricate ordered microscopic structures that no 3D printer can reproduce, but that are easy to look for with a microscope.
Placebos are used as a control group not because "they don't work", but because a drug that works no better than a placebo has no additional benefit. If I ask you whether you prefer to get $110 from me or $100 and you choose the $110, that doesn't mean that the offer of $100 was worthless.
Yes, and one way doctors use placebos is through homeopathy. How else do you think they can convince a patient to take a placebo?
Many "real treatments" are actually only moderately better than placebos and come with significant side effects; yet placebos are often much better than no treatment at all. The problem with eliminating placebos as a treatment option is then that you remove something that can be safe and effective in many cases. If you entrust doctors with the option of prescribing real drugs, you should also entrust them with the option of prescribing homeopathic remedies.
But that's what homeopathy is: "you know, I think the best option in your case would be a homeopathic treatment." That's the only option. They can't prescribe you sugar pills like they use in double blind studies, because they can't actually lie to you about what's in the drugs they give you. If the FDA takes homeopatic medicines off the market, as TFA suggests, doctors have almost no viable options for placebos left.
Whether he is serious or not, right or wrong doesn't matter. People should have the right to make their own choices, even if those choices are unscientific.
That is actually still the case. Establishment medicine still often does a lot more harm than good.
I think it's still valuable: there are many diseases for which drugs aren't much more effective than placebos and have serious side effects. Being able to prescribe a believable but harmless placebo is a useful option for doctors to have. Without homeopathic medicines, doctors are left with either telling the patient to go away without any kind of treatment (sacrificing the placebo effect), or trying to give active drugs with potential side effects.
Placebos often work quite well compared to doing nothing. I have always viewed homeopathy as a good way for doctors to prescribe placebos when that was the medically best option. I think it's a shame that this option is being taken away.
Really? In what way does marketing "coerce" me to do anything?
I didn't single out Al Gore, you did. You put him out there as an example, and I simply explained how he benefits from climate change activism, since you don't seem to be able to figure it out yourself.
What's there to discuss? Subsidies to the oil industry are just another instance of the same b.s. you advocate: someone goes to the government and says "hey, look how big this problem is, give us tax dollars to fix it!" Not only is it the same kind of political corruption, often it's even literally the same companies, receiving tax dollars to pump oil out of the ground, and receiving even more tax dollars to limit CO2 emissions. How do you feel about advocating shoving even more money in the hands of big oil companies?
I think we have already established that you are the angry old lefty who spends his days shouting at Fox News. I really have no idea what the latest Fox News gossip is, but having people like you inform me about it certainly is a "teaching moment".
The tricky bit is that we don't know what greenhouse gas emissions are or to who. They might well be positive externalities to many people, at least in the long run.
And it has the disadvantage that it is subject to massive rent seeking and regulatory capture; that it doesn't compensate the people who suffer the negative externalities; and that nobody knows how to set the tax rates. That's exactly what we're seeing with the carbon taxes.
No, marketing is the science of persuading people to choose to live differently; in the end, it's your free choice what you spend your money on. The only people who can coerce you to do anything are criminals and the government.
Please tell us how getting government subsidies to develop products that otherwise nobody wants, or making massive commissions off carbon trading, is not acting out of greed and self interest.
I didn't even know Al Gore has a private jet, thanks for telling me. Maybe I should start watching Fox News like you apparently do.
In any case, yes, Al Gore is acting out of greed and self interest; without "climate change" as his hobby horse, the guy would be utterly irrelevant.
I agree that the urban development policies, land use restrictions, and zoning laws are harmful to both people and the environment; they largely represent the financial interests of existing, usually well-off property owners. (But, no, the US is far from the only country.)
I agree that that is wrong too. People should pay for what they use and not be forced to subsidize inefficient lifestyles. I don't know, though, how those subsidies work out. Urban infrastructure is heavily subsidized (long range transmission of power, water, etc.). Suburban and rural infrastructure is subsidized too, but in different ways. Although it is a popular meme that city living is efficient, I think that doesn't account for a lot of hidden costs and externalities.
I think you'll find that the great majority of people past their mid-30's actually prefer the suburbs or the country, and if they live in a city or near a city, they'd prefer a single family home with a yard to a condo. I think liberalizing the housing market and reducing regulation would bring down costs everywhere, but I think by and large, Americans live roughly where they want to live anyway.
Condoms don't prevent population growth, economic development does.
If the population were cut in half, you couldn't afford an SUV or a computer. But if you want to experience what earth like that would be like, you can do that today: move to the middle of nowhere, in the US or elsewhere: cheap land, few jobs.
I bike to work every day and live a low carbon footprint life. I do that because I'm selfish.
My point is about coercion, not about what is being coerced. Yes, technology works better than religion. But coerced solutions cause much more harm than voluntary solutions.
Technological solutions that are adopted voluntarily are good; technological solutions mandated and subsidized by government frequently have a horrendous track record.
That is no more unreasonable than any of the other proposed ways of addressing climate change. "Global carbon tax and investment in the development of new energy technologies" are as self-serving, irrational, and unrealistic as what the Pope is proposing.
Notice how everybody who proposes ways of addressing climate change agrees that people need to be coerced to live differently, but that only their own approach is selfless and benign while everybody else acts out of greed and self-interest.
The Netherlands is a wealthy enclave at the northern edge of Europe that is still reaping the benefits of its colonialist past and isolating itself through language and culture. And for every Netherlands, there is a Greece in the EU. If you want to make meaningful comparisons, start by comparing the EU as a whole to the US.
I'm under no "misapprehensions" about Europe because I'm originally from Europe. However, being from Europe, I have a pretty good idea what your misapprehensions are. If you think that anybody can mistake Europe for "communist", you really have no idea what communism is. No, Europe is statist and stagnant, which is much worse because it is so insidious.
Of course, that also means that iTunes is more like a shared marketing agreement, and by making it more difficult for less successful artists to make an attractive deal with Apple for their own marketing, she actually is proposing to hurt them.
I'm sure they are free to cancel their contract with Apple any time. Of course, Taylor Swift wouldn't even exist without iTunes, so she is reluctant to do that. And the fact that Apple is in this bargaining position is really the result of choices that artists made earlier, namely signing up with Apple rather than signing up with a larger variety of companies.
The correct thing to do would be for people like Taylor Swift to cancel their contracts with Apple and sign up with other music services. That would encourage free market competition.
The wrong thing to do would be for antitrust regulators to step in and give people like Swift what they want. That's not because I begrudge Taylor Swift her millions (talentless as she may be), but because it would effectively enshrine Apple and a few other companies as government-regulated monopolies.
This is no "moral hazard" because this is a voluntary transaction between two private parties. Taylor Swift is free to take the deal or leave it, depending on how she sees the risks and benefits.
You're saying that if I and a bunch of musician friends want to develop a new streaming service for some niche market, you want to prohibit them from letting me use their music for free to get the service started in return for larger royalty payments later?
It's people like you and thinking like yours that creates the big, monopolistic corporations that we have.
Hey, Taylor Swift, you aren't going to get much money out of Apple by complaining about how they license and sell music.
But have you considered suing them over the "Swift" language? Obviously, they are using your trademarked good name in order to sell their new language, and you can probably get a well-deserved buck out of them so that you don't have to starve.
Hey, it worked for Bob Dylan.
I don't know what that means, but welfare payments are generally much lower, and there are almost no in-kind benefits like food stamps.
Costs are much lower because services are limited and prices are fixed (resulting in shortages). And health and life expectancy may well be (slightly) better because people receive less medical care.
Indeed, you can't. I just gave you the overall number as a summary. You have to do a lot more research to figure out what's going on on the ground. There is a lot of crappy writing by hysterical left and right wingers, but there are some decent and well-reasoned analyses, like this one: http://www.spiegel.de/internat... (I'm not endorsing everything it says, but it's a good start).
I have fairly conservative fiscal views. I think it would actually be great if the US adopted a German-style welfare system and a German-style health care system. It would greatly simplify our systems and greatly lower costs. But progressives in the US don't allow it to happen because it would result in massive cuts in benefits and two-tiered systems for the rich vs. everybody else; instead, they keep proclaiming the fiction that "Europe" has better benefits than the US with less spending.
Your comments just demonstrate your utter and complete ignorance. Really, people like you make me embarrassed to be a European. Crawl back into the ignorant chauvinist hole you crawled out of.
The idea that US social programs are weak is a fiction. Government social expenditure in the US is 20% of GDP, which is roughly in the middle of the OECD and Europe. But given that US per capita GDP is significantly higher than that of most European nations, that actually puts us near the top in terms of per capita government social spending. And that isn't even counting the massive US non-profit sector.
Rational investors are concerned with risk and return. If you let considerations of the number of failed companies override risk and return considerations, you aren't smarter, you are dumb.
Pretty much everybody uses Unicode these days.
You're just repeating uninformed anti-American beliefs common in Europe. In actual fact, Americans rank fairly low in terms of materialism:
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-p...
You mean the OECD Better Life index?
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex...
The US generally comes out near the top. But those numbers are dubious to begin with: high happiness numbers don't actually mean that people are happy, high voter turnout is not a good measure of civic engagement, staying longest in school is not necessarily a good thing, and high life expectancy and government-paid health care are not necessarily good measures of a good medical system. And comparing the US as a whole against individual EU member nations makes little sense either.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working out very well for Europe. See, you can't make people well off by government decree.
It doesn't matter what delusions you have about "correct" compensation. If Europe pays "superstars" less than they get paid in the US, then the superstars leave, because other countries are willing to pay them market rates. Or if they don't leave for the US, they simply don't work as hard, because what's the point of working hard if you get compensated pretty much as well with less effort?
Difficult as that may be to understand, inequality can have multiple causes and doesn't follow the simplistic relationship you assume. In particular, poorly developed and highly developed nations both have high inequality. Furthermore, what matters here isn't the natural level of inequality that Europe has, but the fact that government policies attempt to reduce it.