To be true to the spirit of homeopathy, it would be done like this:
Before the sugar-pill plant was actually in operation, they'd walk a live duck through the manufacturing area, and thereafter the essense of duck liver would permeate the sugar pills.;)
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
Eh, no, vaccines are NOT homeopathy, nor anything like it. They're a controlled exposure to a broken virus, to educate your system into producing immunity factors, so it won't get blindsided by an uncontrolled exposure to the real thing. They do NOT make your body "heal itself". (In fact, most of the unplesant symptoms of infectious disease are a side effect of your immune response. Healing, if required, is a different and unrelated process.)
Think of vaccine as boot camp for your immune system. "See here, these are enemy soldiers! Practice killing a few of our captive enemies, whom we've armed with non-lethal guns. Now when the Big Attack comes, you'll recognise the Enemy and know how to deal with him."
Whereas homeopathy says, "There is no enemy. Close your eyes and all will be well." Then when the enemy does come, he kills you.
See also my posts above, speculating on how acupuncture actually "works" (possible endorphine effect from what amounts to a neurological counter-irritant), in those cases where it may go beyond pure placebo effect (which itself is likely an endorphin-type effect).
Side note: my original field was biochem/microbiology. I'm not just pulling stuff out of my ass.
I'd guess by the time you get diarrhea, you've already seriously unbalanced your system, and possibly sustained secondary damages... so, yeah -- bad idea!
Back around 1980 I fiddled around with megadoses, and tho I never got sick from it, I did observe that at levels above about 500mg/day per 100 pounds of human, vit.C appeared to be addictive, in that cutting back produced withdrawal symptoms -- notably lack of appetite and poor sleep. About a year later some research came out saying that above certain levels, it was mildly addictive. D'oh!!
Very interesting question, and I'm not sure how I'd answer it. [thinking] I behave more as an agnostic (I don't know or care about the existence of god[s], but sometimes do semi-pagan things) but if backed up against the wall and made to express a real view, I'm actually an atheist (who thinks there probably *are* noncorporeal "somethings out there" that we don't yet understand, but they certainly aren't "God/gods").
In a similar line of thought... I've seen so much magical thinking from everyone who believes in alt-med, it's almost a religion in itself, with alt-med practitioners as modern-day shamen.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
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· Score: 1
Has anyone measured the levels of endorphins and similar brain/neurological chemicals during acupucture treatments? In particular when the patient cannot SEE the needle?? how about when the patient cannot FEEL the needle either??
When acupunture actually appears to work, I wonder if it's not a case of one irritation (the needle) serving to generate endorphins which then distract the body from the irritation being "treated" (pain, dizziness, whatever). Tho I'm sure some patients do get an endorphin rush from their psychological expectations about acupuncture -- thus, the placebo effect.
One wonders if the zinc/vit.C combo might be malabsorption by design, as a sort of prevention of overdosing, since so many people really overdo it when they're "treating" a cold with vit.C.
Excessive vit.C has some nasty effects on calcium metabolism; it's been 30 years since I researched this, but IIRC it causes a shift in blood calcium levels that can lead to excess calcium being deposited in soft tissues, especially in the joints. Which is why massive doses are not such a good idea for arthritis sufferers -- who already have a problem with calcium deposits in the joints!
"Some is good, but more isn't necessarily better" is pretty much true of any nutrient, and most drugs too. As to homeopathy/placebos, well, since it's possible to kill yourself by drinking too much water....
In those limited instances where acupuncture apparently does some good (beyond placebo effects), it's probably because it's a sort of neurological counter-irritant -- annoy one part of the system, and it forgets to be annoyed with another part (such as habitual pain from a "phantom limb") or gets enough of an endorphin rush from the new irritation that the old irritation fades too. I know someone who gets her butt beaten with a whip to alleviate painful menstrual cramps -- same principle, different application.
Accupressure (in whatever variant) probably at best produces the same effect.
However, that's mighty limited as a medical principle.
I remember seeing a double-blind study on chiropracty vs massage -- the study concluded that the two were indistinguishable as therapies, and that in fact chiropractic was mainly glorified massage therapy. (Many years before, I was told much the same by a freakishly honest chiropractor, who also would *not* do "spinal manipulations" because of the distinct risk of spinal cord injury and resulting paralysis.)
All this aside -- I agree with you; the main function of alt-med is to separate the gullible from their wallets, and it is not in alt-med's financial interests that patients determine that they are quacks. And some will die as a result.
BTW, more good reading: The Herbal Physician's Desk Reference. Downright scary, all the side effects and toxins in the majority of "herbal remedies".
My own question to alt-med fans: If it's so great, why is the lifespan so much poorer in parts of the world that use primarily what we'd call alt-med?? (Even when people are well-fed and otherwise not in distress.)
"Add to this the practice of recycling metal which should be classified as low level radioactive waste. I have heard that some metal products are slightly radioactive. Not highly radioactive but enough to set off a radiation meter."
And most of the SoCal desert spent the last two days snowed in. If it hadn't been melting almost as fast as it came down, we'd have 3 FEET instead of a mere 5 inches. 100 miles east, they DID get 3 feet and are still snowed in.
I've been trying to get moved back to Montana, but so far hadn't succeeded... but now Montana has come to me!;)
Interesting... as I say (several times:) above, I've noticed the underpowered PSUs in OEM systems, and that the PSU is the single component most likely to fail in an OEM box -- followed by the motherboard. I've long suspected this is because the underpowered PSU is stressing the other electronics, and the mobo suffers the most.
Conversely, PSU and mobo are very unlikely to fail in clones -- which even at their cheapest, usually have more PSU capacity than an average or even high-end OEM.
My experience here in America is exactly the reverse -- in OEM systems, the single most failure-prone component is the PSU (followed by the mobo, I think partly due to stress from the OEM's very crappy PSUs).
OTOH, in *clone* systems, failed PSUs are pretty rare. Not coincidentally -- so are failed mobos.
Dunno about how dirty our grid is, but I make my clients invest in a UPS or at least a good surge protector, and funny thing, none has ever suffered a major component failure.:)
They mention in the article that PC Power & Cooling was bought by one of the companies whose product they DID test. I don't recall which brand it was. You'll have to actually RTFA to find out. (I know, I know -- how embarrassing!:)
I've got good PSUs and cheapo PSUs in service, mainly because I run mostly on salvage, and that's whatever-comes-along. I've seen both ends die. But the cheapos die more often.
OEM systems use very cheap PSUs. In my experience, the most commonly dead component in OEMs is the PSU, followed by the mobo... which I think has such a high death rate, compared to clone mobos, because the weak PSU stresses all the other electronics.
If I'm going to BUY one, I prefer to load the dice in favour of quality, because odds are the better-made one will outlast the crappy one. Maybe not, but usually so. -- The first really good one that I bought is now over 14 years old, running 2/47 in a fully loaded system for nearly its whole life. It cost about double what the cheapies did back then... and I don't regret one cent of it. Sometimes being cheap is a false economy:
Meanwhile, a friend who buys the cheapest of everything has been thru 3 or 4 PSUs, and over the same timeframe has spent about double what I did.
Not necessarily. The bulging capacitor problem tends to come in clusters. Frex, all the motherboards I had die of the bogus capacitor issue died within a couple months of one another, and some were in storage, others were in use, and none had similar situations or history otherwise, but the one thing they had in common was capacitors from roughly the same manufacturing era (and lack of stabilizer).
The PSUs I've seen in OEM machines have been very bottom end, marginal capacity that are on the edge of overloaded all the time. I think this is one reason why OEM mobos seldom live past age 3.
Hear hear... I'm about fed up with cheap Chinese junk. Have got to where I do without rather than buy tools or rubber goods made in China. The tools are pot metal and did they not hear about Vulcanizing rubber??
Not to mention the suspected lead-poisoning I got off a Chinese-made garden tool.:(
How much does it weigh? Good ones have big capacitors, big rails and heatsinks, and heavier wiring, so they weigh more. Cheap ones have tiny capacitors, light rails and small or no heatsinks, and lighter-gauge wiring, so they weigh less.
The difference can be pretty radical -- a good one can easily weigh 5 pounds, while a cheapie can weigh as little as 12 ounces.
Marginal-capacity PSUs are probably one of the reasons that OEM systems' motherboards are so short-lived compared to clones (such a PSU is always on the edge of being overloaded, what do you think that does to the components that depend on it?) And crap PSUs are a known cause of random bad spots on hard disks, due to microspiking.
Aside from the impact on the lifespan of other components, a good PSU will usually last longer too. This message is brought to you by a 300W PSU that I bought in *1994* (at the time, 300W was a server-class PSU, and hard to come by) which has been running 24/7 almost its entire life, in a fully-loaded system.
Observationally, we seem to have a fairly high standard of national ethics in our military (after all, they're in an even better position to stage a coup, were some whacked-out general so inclined) and that's a good point about the states, which would positively wig out.
But I doubt that vanity would prevent a would-be dictator -- if anything, history tends to indicate the reverse.
Otherwise... yeah, all good factors in our favour, but... Transition is still, at bottom, dependent on the goodwill of a short chain of influential people, and any break in that chain could be bad news for We The People. [shudder]
"You shouldn't think about that too much, because there's no one there to remove a president if he decides to stick around. Its kind of scary, really. At best, you could hope for a rouge [sic] general to take him out by force, but hopefully not overstay his welcome. Its kind of amazing that we've had so many orderly transitions of power, now that I think about it."
Whilst reading this thread, I had the exact same thought.. the President is in a position where he *could* go "Leave? Who's gonna make me??" and I'm not sure there's a mechanism to forcibly eject such a person, nor what would happen even if there is. In fact, that scenario differs little from what has happened in countless other countries. Get support of a military faction, and you've got yourself a ready-made dictatorship.
As you say... the real wonder indeed is that we've had such a long history of orderly transitions. One suspects that the main reason may be not our orderly nature [?!!], but that we're such a far-flung country that a one-man dictatorship is at best impractical, because (barring military intervention) remote states can likewise go "Oh yeah? Who's gonna make us??"
How about this: a very direct and immediate sanction, such as not allowing the offending congresscritter to introduce/sponsor legislation for the rest of the session, nor to vote on legislation for the rest of said session. (He gets another chance in the next session, under the theory that everyone should have an opportunity to see the error of their ways and improve their behaviour. If he screws up again... well, he loses his privileges again!)
That would have the added effect of enraging his electorate (who suddenly have that much less voice in Congress) and a high probability of him being ejected from office at the next opportunity. And it might have the side effect of making the voters better scrutinize candidates in the first place.
Hmm, the more I think about this, the better I like it... Essentially, a form of congressional shunning, which makes the offender ineffective, thus not a threat to the rest of us.
I think this is a side effect of the current legal culture of victimhood.
It's very much the same if you're a livestock producer and get falsely accused of "abuse" or "neglect" -- your animals and often your other property are confiscated (and often *profitably* disposed of by the "rescuer") before you're even formally charged, and chances are you'll never be allowed to face your accuser in court.
In this scenario, the "helpless animals" are cast in the same role as the "rape victim" and in the eyes of the legal and social lynch mob, the accused is guilty by definition, with absolutely no recourse to facts nor to the accuser's motivations.
Good point. It isn't *necessary* that equipment fails; it's only necessary that there be a chance that the human body will fail under the stress. Frex, all the bottled oxygen in the world won't help you if your body is no longer able to absorb and/or retain that oxygen, and at that point it doesn't matter how perfectly that oxygen bottle performs.
Some of the K6-2 CPU family, notably 400MHz chips made in (IIRC) Sept 98, had a bug that crashed 32bit code. (Linux wouldn't run on 'em either.) Win95's installer is 16bit.. so it'll install but not run. Win98 seems to have included a workaround for this CPU bug. You seem to have discovered a new and different workaround for Win95.:)
A friend encountered it and raised hell with AMD until he got to a tech dude who knew what the problem was, and who confirmed that it was indeed a CPU bug. But AMD refused to warranty these chips, and the bug also affected one of my customers... which is one of several reasons I've become an Intel CPU bigot.:)
As to your original contention... I agree, you can't count on compatibility across the ages. And even if DOS runs perfectly on 2025AD's 30GHz CPU, that's no guarantee that your DOS *apps* will still run -- witness the many old Pascal apps that die with "Runtime Error:200" on 200+MHz CPUs, and the available patches don't fix all of 'em. Emulators are not perfect. Media adapters are quirky. The reasons why digital data can become orphaned are as endless as the varieties of digital storage!
Most of my irreplaceable data is essentially text... and I'm reminded that I ought to update my printouts. Time to drag that out old cheap-to-run pin-impact printer and find that case of perforated paper:)
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To be true to the spirit of homeopathy, it would be done like this:
Before the sugar-pill plant was actually in operation, they'd walk a live duck through the manufacturing area, and thereafter the essense of duck liver would permeate the sugar pills. ;)
Eh, no, vaccines are NOT homeopathy, nor anything like it. They're a controlled exposure to a broken virus, to educate your system into producing immunity factors, so it won't get blindsided by an uncontrolled exposure to the real thing. They do NOT make your body "heal itself". (In fact, most of the unplesant symptoms of infectious disease are a side effect of your immune response. Healing, if required, is a different and unrelated process.)
Think of vaccine as boot camp for your immune system. "See here, these are enemy soldiers! Practice killing a few of our captive enemies, whom we've armed with non-lethal guns. Now when the Big Attack comes, you'll recognise the Enemy and know how to deal with him."
Whereas homeopathy says, "There is no enemy. Close your eyes and all will be well." Then when the enemy does come, he kills you.
See also my posts above, speculating on how acupuncture actually "works" (possible endorphine effect from what amounts to a neurological counter-irritant), in those cases where it may go beyond pure placebo effect (which itself is likely an endorphin-type effect).
Side note: my original field was biochem/microbiology. I'm not just pulling stuff out of my ass.
I'd guess by the time you get diarrhea, you've already seriously unbalanced your system, and possibly sustained secondary damages ... so, yeah -- bad idea!
Back around 1980 I fiddled around with megadoses, and tho I never got sick from it, I did observe that at levels above about 500mg/day per 100 pounds of human, vit.C appeared to be addictive, in that cutting back produced withdrawal symptoms -- notably lack of appetite and poor sleep. About a year later some research came out saying that above certain levels, it was mildly addictive. D'oh!!
Very interesting question, and I'm not sure how I'd answer it. [thinking] I behave more as an agnostic (I don't know or care about the existence of god[s], but sometimes do semi-pagan things) but if backed up against the wall and made to express a real view, I'm actually an atheist (who thinks there probably *are* noncorporeal "somethings out there" that we don't yet understand, but they certainly aren't "God/gods").
In a similar line of thought... I've seen so much magical thinking from everyone who believes in alt-med, it's almost a religion in itself, with alt-med practitioners as modern-day shamen.
Has anyone measured the levels of endorphins and similar brain/neurological chemicals during acupucture treatments? In particular when the patient cannot SEE the needle?? how about when the patient cannot FEEL the needle either??
When acupunture actually appears to work, I wonder if it's not a case of one irritation (the needle) serving to generate endorphins which then distract the body from the irritation being "treated" (pain, dizziness, whatever). Tho I'm sure some patients do get an endorphin rush from their psychological expectations about acupuncture -- thus, the placebo effect.
One wonders if the zinc/vit.C combo might be malabsorption by design, as a sort of prevention of overdosing, since so many people really overdo it when they're "treating" a cold with vit.C.
Excessive vit.C has some nasty effects on calcium metabolism; it's been 30 years since I researched this, but IIRC it causes a shift in blood calcium levels that can lead to excess calcium being deposited in soft tissues, especially in the joints. Which is why massive doses are not such a good idea for arthritis sufferers -- who already have a problem with calcium deposits in the joints!
"Some is good, but more isn't necessarily better" is pretty much true of any nutrient, and most drugs too. As to homeopathy/placebos, well, since it's possible to kill yourself by drinking too much water....
In those limited instances where acupuncture apparently does some good (beyond placebo effects), it's probably because it's a sort of neurological counter-irritant -- annoy one part of the system, and it forgets to be annoyed with another part (such as habitual pain from a "phantom limb") or gets enough of an endorphin rush from the new irritation that the old irritation fades too. I know someone who gets her butt beaten with a whip to alleviate painful menstrual cramps -- same principle, different application.
Accupressure (in whatever variant) probably at best produces the same effect.
However, that's mighty limited as a medical principle.
I remember seeing a double-blind study on chiropracty vs massage -- the study concluded that the two were indistinguishable as therapies, and that in fact chiropractic was mainly glorified massage therapy. (Many years before, I was told much the same by a freakishly honest chiropractor, who also would *not* do "spinal manipulations" because of the distinct risk of spinal cord injury and resulting paralysis.)
All this aside -- I agree with you; the main function of alt-med is to separate the gullible from their wallets, and it is not in alt-med's financial interests that patients determine that they are quacks. And some will die as a result.
BTW, more good reading: The Herbal Physician's Desk Reference. Downright scary, all the side effects and toxins in the majority of "herbal remedies".
My own question to alt-med fans: If it's so great, why is the lifespan so much poorer in parts of the world that use primarily what we'd call alt-med?? (Even when people are well-fed and otherwise not in distress.)
Think of HMOs as outsourced medicine, and all becomes clear.
An AC responds with this frightful information:
"Add to this the practice of recycling metal which should be classified as low level radioactive waste. I have heard that some metal products are slightly radioactive. Not highly radioactive but enough to set off a radiation meter."
'Nuf said!
And most of the SoCal desert spent the last two days snowed in. If it hadn't been melting almost as fast as it came down, we'd have 3 FEET instead of a mere 5 inches. 100 miles east, they DID get 3 feet and are still snowed in.
I've been trying to get moved back to Montana, but so far hadn't succeeded... but now Montana has come to me! ;)
Interesting... as I say (several times :) above, I've noticed the underpowered PSUs in OEM systems, and that the PSU is the single component most likely to fail in an OEM box -- followed by the motherboard. I've long suspected this is because the underpowered PSU is stressing the other electronics, and the mobo suffers the most.
Conversely, PSU and mobo are very unlikely to fail in clones -- which even at their cheapest, usually have more PSU capacity than an average or even high-end OEM.
My experience here in America is exactly the reverse -- in OEM systems, the single most failure-prone component is the PSU (followed by the mobo, I think partly due to stress from the OEM's very crappy PSUs).
OTOH, in *clone* systems, failed PSUs are pretty rare. Not coincidentally -- so are failed mobos.
Dunno about how dirty our grid is, but I make my clients invest in a UPS or at least a good surge protector, and funny thing, none has ever suffered a major component failure. :)
They mention in the article that PC Power & Cooling was bought by one of the companies whose product they DID test. I don't recall which brand it was. You'll have to actually RTFA to find out. (I know, I know -- how embarrassing! :)
Luck happens as often as shit :)
I've got good PSUs and cheapo PSUs in service, mainly because I run mostly on salvage, and that's whatever-comes-along. I've seen both ends die. But the cheapos die more often.
OEM systems use very cheap PSUs. In my experience, the most commonly dead component in OEMs is the PSU, followed by the mobo... which I think has such a high death rate, compared to clone mobos, because the weak PSU stresses all the other electronics.
If I'm going to BUY one, I prefer to load the dice in favour of quality, because odds are the better-made one will outlast the crappy one. Maybe not, but usually so. -- The first really good one that I bought is now over 14 years old, running 2/47 in a fully loaded system for nearly its whole life. It cost about double what the cheapies did back then... and I don't regret one cent of it. Sometimes being cheap is a false economy:
Meanwhile, a friend who buys the cheapest of everything has been thru 3 or 4 PSUs, and over the same timeframe has spent about double what I did.
Not necessarily. The bulging capacitor problem tends to come in clusters. Frex, all the motherboards I had die of the bogus capacitor issue died within a couple months of one another, and some were in storage, others were in use, and none had similar situations or history otherwise, but the one thing they had in common was capacitors from roughly the same manufacturing era (and lack of stabilizer).
The PSUs I've seen in OEM machines have been very bottom end, marginal capacity that are on the edge of overloaded all the time. I think this is one reason why OEM mobos seldom live past age 3.
Hear hear... I'm about fed up with cheap Chinese junk. Have got to where I do without rather than buy tools or rubber goods made in China. The tools are pot metal and did they not hear about Vulcanizing rubber??
Not to mention the suspected lead-poisoning I got off a Chinese-made garden tool. :(
A simple way to evaluate PSUs:
How much does it weigh? Good ones have big capacitors, big rails and heatsinks, and heavier wiring, so they weigh more. Cheap ones have tiny capacitors, light rails and small or no heatsinks, and lighter-gauge wiring, so they weigh less.
The difference can be pretty radical -- a good one can easily weigh 5 pounds, while a cheapie can weigh as little as 12 ounces.
Marginal-capacity PSUs are probably one of the reasons that OEM systems' motherboards are so short-lived compared to clones (such a PSU is always on the edge of being overloaded, what do you think that does to the components that depend on it?) And crap PSUs are a known cause of random bad spots on hard disks, due to microspiking.
Aside from the impact on the lifespan of other components, a good PSU will usually last longer too. This message is brought to you by a 300W PSU that I bought in *1994* (at the time, 300W was a server-class PSU, and hard to come by) which has been running 24/7 almost its entire life, in a fully-loaded system.
Interesting test case. How have such cases turned out in other venues? I'm sure the RIAA meddling with ISPs can't be the only such case!
More simply expressed as "Follow the money". This applies everywhere money is part of the picture in any way whatsoever.
Observationally, we seem to have a fairly high standard of national ethics in our military (after all, they're in an even better position to stage a coup, were some whacked-out general so inclined) and that's a good point about the states, which would positively wig out.
But I doubt that vanity would prevent a would-be dictator -- if anything, history tends to indicate the reverse.
Otherwise... yeah, all good factors in our favour, but... Transition is still, at bottom, dependent on the goodwill of a short chain of influential people, and any break in that chain could be bad news for We The People. [shudder]
"You shouldn't think about that too much, because there's no one there to remove a president if he decides to stick around. Its kind of scary, really. At best, you could hope for a rouge [sic] general to take him out by force, but hopefully not overstay his welcome. Its kind of amazing that we've had so many orderly transitions of power, now that I think about it."
Whilst reading this thread, I had the exact same thought.. the President is in a position where he *could* go "Leave? Who's gonna make me??" and I'm not sure there's a mechanism to forcibly eject such a person, nor what would happen even if there is. In fact, that scenario differs little from what has happened in countless other countries. Get support of a military faction, and you've got yourself a ready-made dictatorship.
As you say... the real wonder indeed is that we've had such a long history of orderly transitions. One suspects that the main reason may be not our orderly nature [?!!], but that we're such a far-flung country that a one-man dictatorship is at best impractical, because (barring military intervention) remote states can likewise go "Oh yeah? Who's gonna make us??"
How about this: a very direct and immediate sanction, such as not allowing the offending congresscritter to introduce/sponsor legislation for the rest of the session, nor to vote on legislation for the rest of said session. (He gets another chance in the next session, under the theory that everyone should have an opportunity to see the error of their ways and improve their behaviour. If he screws up again... well, he loses his privileges again!)
That would have the added effect of enraging his electorate (who suddenly have that much less voice in Congress) and a high probability of him being ejected from office at the next opportunity. And it might have the side effect of making the voters better scrutinize candidates in the first place.
Hmm, the more I think about this, the better I like it... Essentially, a form of congressional shunning, which makes the offender ineffective, thus not a threat to the rest of us.
I think this is a side effect of the current legal culture of victimhood.
It's very much the same if you're a livestock producer and get falsely accused of "abuse" or "neglect" -- your animals and often your other property are confiscated (and often *profitably* disposed of by the "rescuer") before you're even formally charged, and chances are you'll never be allowed to face your accuser in court.
In this scenario, the "helpless animals" are cast in the same role as the "rape victim" and in the eyes of the legal and social lynch mob, the accused is guilty by definition, with absolutely no recourse to facts nor to the accuser's motivations.
Good point. It isn't *necessary* that equipment fails; it's only necessary that there be a chance that the human body will fail under the stress.
Frex, all the bottled oxygen in the world won't help you if your body is no longer able to absorb and/or retain that oxygen, and at that point it doesn't matter how perfectly that oxygen bottle performs.
Some of the K6-2 CPU family, notably 400MHz chips made in (IIRC) Sept 98, had a bug that crashed 32bit code. (Linux wouldn't run on 'em either.) Win95's installer is 16bit.. so it'll install but not run. Win98 seems to have included a workaround for this CPU bug. You seem to have discovered a new and different workaround for Win95. :)
A friend encountered it and raised hell with AMD until he got to a tech dude who knew what the problem was, and who confirmed that it was indeed a CPU bug. But AMD refused to warranty these chips, and the bug also affected one of my customers ... which is one of several reasons I've become an Intel CPU bigot. :)
As to your original contention... I agree, you can't count on compatibility across the ages. And even if DOS runs perfectly on 2025AD's 30GHz CPU, that's no guarantee that your DOS *apps* will still run -- witness the many old Pascal apps that die with "Runtime Error:200" on 200+MHz CPUs, and the available patches don't fix all of 'em. Emulators are not perfect. Media adapters are quirky. The reasons why digital data can become orphaned are as endless as the varieties of digital storage!
Most of my irreplaceable data is essentially text... and I'm reminded that I ought to update my printouts. Time to drag that out old cheap-to-run pin-impact printer and find that case of perforated paper :)