The only real environmental problem with burial is that it ties up valuable urban land in a cemetery forever.
Having some green spots in the city is hardly an "environmental problem", it's more like an environmental benefit.
Nevertheless, in practice, graves and cemeteries are eventually reused one way or another (less so in the US, but the US is comparatively young).
If you want to turn your remains into a tree, just have yourself buried in the usual way (ashes or coffin) and plant a seed. No need for buying some proprietary product. Your cemetery gardener may even select a species that will actually grow properly under the local conditions.
Of course. Why ever do you think they wouldn't? LTE makes much more efficient use of bandwidth than the older protocols, including for voice. The major carriers not only use LTE for voice, all except Sprint offer VoLTE (which gets rid of the circuit switched voice network entirely). Carriers have a strong incentive to move to LTE and VoLTE.
There is a need for a universal identifier standard for recipients and communication of some kind. A proprietary one is not acceptable, in the least because tech companies come and go like pop stars.
Sure, and it's called a "host name". You can register your own, paid for by yourself, or use a company provided one (in the latter case, often tied to the services of that company). And, coincidentally, it's also what's used with many IM clients by many different companies, where you can look up recipients by their E-mail address.
AT&T can fall off the map tomorrow, and phone numbers continue to work around the world. The advantage of phone and email (as technologies) over facebook messenger is that they aren't tied to a particular company AT ALL.
And sooner or later, that's going to happen with chat as well. The market just hasn't settled down yet, since companies are still figuring out what to do with these messenger services and how to encode and encrypt data, and interoperate and propagate presence data in real time. That's just a lot trickier than phone and E-mail service.
Plenty of people - even people w/ computers and phones - have stayed away from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et al. Why would any of THOSE be a universal contact mechanism?
Somebody needs to run the directory service, needs to adjudicate disputes over identity and abuse, and needs to run the proxies that allow firewall traversal. For most people, the best choice for that is a large number of private companies. You don't like Facebook? Use one of the other ones.
What would you prefer? A single government directory, accessible to the NSA, DHS, and IRS? Something where the president can put you on a "no talk list" at his whim? Something where your ability to communicate ends up effectively subject to congressional and court approval?
I did read what you said, and it is nonsense. You are starting with so many faulty assumptions about the US and European educational system and about the relationship between spending and quality of education that one simply can't debunk it all in a few lines. You really need to read up, get some facts, and use your head before you keep spouting the progressive party line.
Yeah, my friend teaches at one. The kids attending it are mostly from children of poor immigrants. These teachers are doing the best they can. One key difference is that my friend actually gets paid more to work in a troubled school, while in America we pay teachers in low income schools less, furthering the divide. [,,,] The difference being that in the US and Europe seems to be an honest attempt at remedying the situation rather than simply being complacent with the vast difference in quality of education for low and high income students.
You're completely out of touch with reality. First, the US redirects vast amounts of money to inner city schools and problem schools, far more so than any place in Europe. Second, increased per student spending does not lead to improved educational outcomes. The latter point is true both within the US and across nations. In the US, many of the worst performing schools are also the most expensive ones. It is particularly obvious when comparing countries because the US spends far above OECD average on students, but achieves only average results.
It doesn't help poor people who can't afford to pay for private school even with the vouchers. Those people will be be stuck in a public school with even less funding as wealthier people flee to private schools. And as I said. I am not against vouchers. This is just the reality of what happens.
That's not a "reality", it's something you're fabricating out of thin air. It is absurd to think that "poor people" wouldn't find a wide range of private school offerings for the average $12000/student that the US spends on education, if handed out as vouchers.
The idea that the US isn't spending enough money on primary or secondary education, anywhere in the country, is ridiculous, in particular if you compare US numbers with Europe.
They almost certainly can't "crack PGP"; they may, however, have found flaws in the way Blackberry uses PGP. Or perhaps they are simply referring to the fact that they can intercept data as it is being decrypted on the device.
Yes the taxes are certainly forced. But this is not the same as being forced to get immunizations.
Taking people's stuff through the threat of force and then giving it back with conditions certainly sounds like "forcing" people to me.
I thoink if anything vouchers probably help wealthy people most of all. They are the people who would be sending their kids to private school anyway, but with vouchers they can get a big discount.
No, vouchers mostly help lower income people, who finally get a choice about schools. A "discount" on high school doesn't make a big difference to wealthy people.
Most of the schools I've seen in Europe were way better than the schools I attended in early life (LAUSD).
About half of the schools in countries like Germany don't even attempt to prepare students for college or university; did you "see" any such schools?
There are lots of people stuck in substandard schools in poor communities. The difference in quality between affluent schools and low income schools is immense.
As it is in Europe. What matters is, in fact, not the amount of money available to schools, but the demographics of students and parents.
Saying that poor people who forced to get immunized because they must send their kids to public schools, is like saying that I am forced to use public transportation because I can't afford a car. That's not what force is. That's still well within the realm of choices.
No, the "force" is in the taxation itself, something lower income people are disproportionately subjected to.
I thought you were using "politically" in the colloquial sense. You want the curricula to be determined non-politically (i.e. without the influence of the citizenry) ?
Correct. I want curricula to be determined by the market. That is, there should be a wide range of schools offering a wide range of educational options, and parents vote with their dollars.
People could just as easily say the converse. We can't fix these social and cultural problems because the education system is broken.
US public schools are pretty decent, and US private schools are excellent. And for all its problems, the US is still culturally and socially way ahead of Europe, although unfortunately, European political mistakes are gradually making inroads in the US. The US should return to its more classically liberal tradition of individualism and personal responsibility, instead of trying to have government "fix" society.
It saddens me that "modern" parents are unable to trust their kids.
People have fewer kids so those kids become more "valuable" to them. At the same time, as society gets safer and safer, people's expectations of safety go up and they become more risk averse. On top of that, there has been a general trend towards the paternalistic state, and that change is particularly pronounced in the US (Europe has had this for a long time).
And I assumed that their are similar laws in the US, but the article implies that a court ruling was necessary to clarify that.
There are generally no laws either way; a lot of it is up to local laws and local authorities. And I think a federal law "clarifying" this is a bad idea, because what works in rural Wisconsin isn't necessary right for inner city Chicago. European nations are culturally far more homogeneous (one might say "ethnically cleansed"), so a single policy tends to work across entire nations, and often doesn't even need to be stated explicitly.
Walkers at my daughter's middle school require permits that they have to pay a fee for. It's ridiculous.
They want to make sure parents understand and agree to assuming liability (mostly for traffic accidents), they want to make sure you understand safe routes and that you instruct your kids in what to do, and they want to make sure your kids carry identification in case they are stopped by police for truancy or in case there is an accident. Schools have been doing this forever, both in the US and in Europe. Some do it informally, others want you to opt in more explicitly (perhaps because they got sued in the past).
At the same time, for whatever reason, walking to Elementary school was just fine, and walking to the high school is fine
And it's fine for your middle school as well. Really.
Well, and it works that way in many places in the US as well. But unlike Switzerland, the US is a huge country with many different regional cultures. What's OK in SLC may not be OK in Berkeley and vice versa. Imagine that.
What is the motivation for having this banned in the first place?
It wasn't "banned". Rather, police and neighbors were concerned about seeing unaccompanied children and stepped in, often causing a nuisance. The same thing has always happened in Europe as well: police can and do stop unaccompanied kids during school hours.
Unaccompanied, individual walks to school are becoming less common in Europe as well these days, and for the same reasons: demographics and increasing wealth. Many kids are driven to school by their parents, many others take buses, and many of the ones who walk walk in groups (actually, even that has a long tradition). The US is simply a little ahead of the curve.
This means before that, parents where in danger to be charged. This has almost the same effect than a law prohibiting it. Very strange.
It's not that strange, and not that different between the US and Germany: kids are increasingly accompanied to school by adults, whether on foot or in a vehicle. In Europe, the Pedibus is becoming increasingly popular. The drivers of this trend are the same everywhere: smaller families, longer distances between school and home, and generally wealthier parents.
And, yes, in Germany too, police may stop unaccompanied kids who are out and about during school hours; that's nothing new either.
For a historical reference, see Typhoid Mary. [...] When you don't vaccinate, you're increasing the chances that others will be infected.
Great example. There is a vaccine available for typhoid. Do we mandate typhoid vaccinations for everybody? No. That's because whether vaccinations even make sense needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Herd immunity would break down, diseases we've beaten back would return with a vengeance, and many people would get sick and die
That argument works, to a limited degree, for smallpox and polio. It doesn't work for measles or HPV or typhoid or tuberculosis. Even those diseases that the argument works for, almost everybody who would get sick and die would do so as a consequence of their own choices, not due to a breakdown of herd immunity.
Babies too young to be vaccinated, people with immune disorders, and people for whom the vaccines didn't "take" (vaccines aren't 100% - close but not 100%). You might have the right to decide your children's medical fate, but you don't have the right to have your children infect others.
Again, those arguments don't make sense without being clear about which vaccine you are talking. Historically, those are not the reasons for MMR, for example.
Leaving it up to individual people to decide would mean people would make their decisions based on Facebook posts and the words of ex-Playboy models.
And when you mandate vaccinations that would mean that you mandate medical procedures on the words of pharma lobbyists and government experts. History shows that that is far worse than a few kids getting measles.
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (1927), Buck-v-Bell
It is the same issue as the issue of paying for public schools if you don;t vaccinate your children, because in both scenarios you are forced to pay for a service you aren't using.
It would be "the same issue" if we were talking about a small expense. But schooling is major and mandatory. Lower income families do not have an economic choice: they must send their kids to public school, no matter what.
What political determined curricula are you referring to?
All of them: curricula are politically determined, through legislatures and school boards.
It's not that public schools in general are bad, there are many examples of countries who do public schools very well. We just don't seem capable of it at the moment.
I come from one of those countries whose public schools are supposedly very good; they aren't. Even if you look at something like the PISA study, the US is just fairly average, with the differences between countries not being all that large. European schools have the same kinds of problems that US schools do. When they work a little better (e.g., in Finland), it's due to social and cultural factors.
That's not the question until law enforcement start showing up at your house with vaccines and guns.
Law enforcement doesn't have to show up with vaccines on your doorstep in order to coerce you; they can arrest you, or take your stuff, or limit your freedom of movement, or whatever until you "choose" to get vaccinated. Those approaches are just as coercive as if they showed up with vaccines at your house.
Schools are paid for by property taxes. This is a horrible system in general. Vouchers don't fix this problem, because you are still paying for the schools if you have zero kids.
Whether people who don't have any kids pay for the education of other people's kids, and how that education is delivered are two entirely separate issues. Regardless of where you stand on the first point, delivering education through a public school system with politically determined curricula and policies is increasingly failing.
One of the things many in medicine are worried about is that anti-vax people are going to provide a host population and something like measles will mutate and go back to killing millions of people.
The mortality rate from measles in the US is very low. Nominally, these days, it is 0.2%, but that already selects for an unhealthy population. Before vaccination, it was actually less than 0.1%. Measles is fatal at a significant rate only in malnourished and otherwise unhealthy populations. Saying that the measles virus might "mutate and go back to killing millions of people" is utterly ludicrous and unscientific. The reason we vaccinate against measles is because a cheap, safe, and effective vaccine became available, and because it reduces the number of sick days for children and prevents birth defects, not because it was some highly lethal disease. There have been some killer viruses that we have routinely vaccinated against (smallpox, polio), but measles isn't one of them.
This is why vaccines should be 100% mandatory unless there is a valid medical reason.
Talking about "vaccines" as if they were all like the measles vaccine is completely unscientific. In fact, many vaccines are nowhere near as safe or effective as the measles vaccine.
BS Chemical and Biological Engineering in Germany
It is sorely disappointing to see that someone educated in Germany believes that the government should be able to impose medical procedures on its citizens. The same arguments you make for the benefits of vaccination to society have been made by eugenicists; in fact, not just the same arguments, mandatory vaccinations have been cited as a legal precedent in allowing forced sterilizations. You should be ashamed of yourself.
1) You should have written that the herd effect needs to be proven to exist; it's obviously beneficial.
"Obviously beneficial" to who? If a vaccine causes serious side effects in 1% of an animal herd, the "herd effect" can still be "obviously beneficial" to the rancher, we would not and should not accept such risks for human vaccines. "Herd immunity" isn't the simple concept that you assume it is.
2) It has been proven, empirically, hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It does not need to be proven for each and every vaccine individually.
Herd immunity depends on the details of how a disease is transmitted, how infections it is, what social groups are preferentially infected with it, and how they interact. So, in fact, you do have to prove for each disease that "herd immunity" actually works for that particular disease. Even then, there are several more things you have to establish, namely that the vaccine is essentially completely safe, highly effective, and cost-effective. Most known vaccines don't pass those tests, which is why only a small number of vaccines are actually routinely given.
Even then, herd immunity often is not very useful: most of the people ostensibly protected through "herd immunity", namely people with weakened immune systems, are not helped significantly by a handful of common vaccines, since there are hundreds of viruses that are dangerous to them that we have no vaccine against.
There is only one a good reason not to vaccinate: If you have a medical condition (e.g. immune disorder or allergic to the ingredients) that precludes vaccination.
Actually, that is only true for a few widely used vaccines; there are many vaccines that are quite risky, which is why they are not routinely given.
In any case, even for the safest vaccines, you seem to think that "the only good reason" translates into "the decision should be taken out of the hands of individuals and be placed in the hands of doctors or experts". Sorry, that doesn't follow. My doctor may tell me that surgery or some drug the best treatment for some condition I have, but the decision of whether to go ahead with surgery or take that drug is still mine to make, not his. It's the same with vaccines.
there are a lot of people who are unable (for various medical reasons) to get certain vaccinations or whom otherwise are not completely protected by vaccinces, their only protection from certain terrible diseases is via herd immunity.
There aren't "a lot of people" like that, there are a few people like that. And they already need to take precautions, because in addition to the handful of diseases that we have vaccines against, there are susceptible to thousands of viral and bacterial diseases that we don't have vaccines against.
And as far as HPV is concerned, arguments about herd immunity are bullshit anyway, since the strains of HPV that Gardasil protects against aren't transmitted through casual contact.
Slashdot Mirror
Having some green spots in the city is hardly an "environmental problem", it's more like an environmental benefit. Nevertheless, in practice, graves and cemeteries are eventually reused one way or another (less so in the US, but the US is comparatively young).
If you want to turn your remains into a tree, just have yourself buried in the usual way (ashes or coffin) and plant a seed. No need for buying some proprietary product. Your cemetery gardener may even select a species that will actually grow properly under the local conditions.
Of course. Why ever do you think they wouldn't? LTE makes much more efficient use of bandwidth than the older protocols, including for voice. The major carriers not only use LTE for voice, all except Sprint offer VoLTE (which gets rid of the circuit switched voice network entirely). Carriers have a strong incentive to move to LTE and VoLTE.
Sure, and it's called a "host name". You can register your own, paid for by yourself, or use a company provided one (in the latter case, often tied to the services of that company). And, coincidentally, it's also what's used with many IM clients by many different companies, where you can look up recipients by their E-mail address.
E-mail pretty much killed FAX. Yes, some technologies do get replaced.
Many actually do. And all US carriers are moving to SIMs and LTE anyway.
And sooner or later, that's going to happen with chat as well. The market just hasn't settled down yet, since companies are still figuring out what to do with these messenger services and how to encode and encrypt data, and interoperate and propagate presence data in real time. That's just a lot trickier than phone and E-mail service.
Somebody needs to run the directory service, needs to adjudicate disputes over identity and abuse, and needs to run the proxies that allow firewall traversal. For most people, the best choice for that is a large number of private companies. You don't like Facebook? Use one of the other ones. What would you prefer? A single government directory, accessible to the NSA, DHS, and IRS? Something where the president can put you on a "no talk list" at his whim? Something where your ability to communicate ends up effectively subject to congressional and court approval?
I did read what you said, and it is nonsense. You are starting with so many faulty assumptions about the US and European educational system and about the relationship between spending and quality of education that one simply can't debunk it all in a few lines. You really need to read up, get some facts, and use your head before you keep spouting the progressive party line.
You're completely out of touch with reality. First, the US redirects vast amounts of money to inner city schools and problem schools, far more so than any place in Europe. Second, increased per student spending does not lead to improved educational outcomes. The latter point is true both within the US and across nations. In the US, many of the worst performing schools are also the most expensive ones. It is particularly obvious when comparing countries because the US spends far above OECD average on students, but achieves only average results.
That's not a "reality", it's something you're fabricating out of thin air. It is absurd to think that "poor people" wouldn't find a wide range of private school offerings for the average $12000/student that the US spends on education, if handed out as vouchers.
The idea that the US isn't spending enough money on primary or secondary education, anywhere in the country, is ridiculous, in particular if you compare US numbers with Europe.
They almost certainly can't "crack PGP"; they may, however, have found flaws in the way Blackberry uses PGP. Or perhaps they are simply referring to the fact that they can intercept data as it is being decrypted on the device.
Taking people's stuff through the threat of force and then giving it back with conditions certainly sounds like "forcing" people to me.
No, vouchers mostly help lower income people, who finally get a choice about schools. A "discount" on high school doesn't make a big difference to wealthy people.
About half of the schools in countries like Germany don't even attempt to prepare students for college or university; did you "see" any such schools?
As it is in Europe. What matters is, in fact, not the amount of money available to schools, but the demographics of students and parents.
No, the "force" is in the taxation itself, something lower income people are disproportionately subjected to.
Correct. I want curricula to be determined by the market. That is, there should be a wide range of schools offering a wide range of educational options, and parents vote with their dollars.
US public schools are pretty decent, and US private schools are excellent. And for all its problems, the US is still culturally and socially way ahead of Europe, although unfortunately, European political mistakes are gradually making inroads in the US. The US should return to its more classically liberal tradition of individualism and personal responsibility, instead of trying to have government "fix" society.
People have fewer kids so those kids become more "valuable" to them. At the same time, as society gets safer and safer, people's expectations of safety go up and they become more risk averse. On top of that, there has been a general trend towards the paternalistic state, and that change is particularly pronounced in the US (Europe has had this for a long time).
There are generally no laws either way; a lot of it is up to local laws and local authorities. And I think a federal law "clarifying" this is a bad idea, because what works in rural Wisconsin isn't necessary right for inner city Chicago. European nations are culturally far more homogeneous (one might say "ethnically cleansed"), so a single policy tends to work across entire nations, and often doesn't even need to be stated explicitly.
They want to make sure parents understand and agree to assuming liability (mostly for traffic accidents), they want to make sure you understand safe routes and that you instruct your kids in what to do, and they want to make sure your kids carry identification in case they are stopped by police for truancy or in case there is an accident. Schools have been doing this forever, both in the US and in Europe. Some do it informally, others want you to opt in more explicitly (perhaps because they got sued in the past).
And it's fine for your middle school as well. Really.
Well, and it works that way in many places in the US as well. But unlike Switzerland, the US is a huge country with many different regional cultures. What's OK in SLC may not be OK in Berkeley and vice versa. Imagine that.
It wasn't "banned". Rather, police and neighbors were concerned about seeing unaccompanied children and stepped in, often causing a nuisance. The same thing has always happened in Europe as well: police can and do stop unaccompanied kids during school hours.
Unaccompanied, individual walks to school are becoming less common in Europe as well these days, and for the same reasons: demographics and increasing wealth. Many kids are driven to school by their parents, many others take buses, and many of the ones who walk walk in groups (actually, even that has a long tradition). The US is simply a little ahead of the curve.
It's not that strange, and not that different between the US and Germany: kids are increasingly accompanied to school by adults, whether on foot or in a vehicle. In Europe, the Pedibus is becoming increasingly popular. The drivers of this trend are the same everywhere: smaller families, longer distances between school and home, and generally wealthier parents. And, yes, in Germany too, police may stop unaccompanied kids who are out and about during school hours; that's nothing new either.
Great example. There is a vaccine available for typhoid. Do we mandate typhoid vaccinations for everybody? No. That's because whether vaccinations even make sense needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
That argument works, to a limited degree, for smallpox and polio. It doesn't work for measles or HPV or typhoid or tuberculosis. Even those diseases that the argument works for, almost everybody who would get sick and die would do so as a consequence of their own choices, not due to a breakdown of herd immunity.
Again, those arguments don't make sense without being clear about which vaccine you are talking. Historically, those are not the reasons for MMR, for example.
And when you mandate vaccinations that would mean that you mandate medical procedures on the words of pharma lobbyists and government experts. History shows that that is far worse than a few kids getting measles.
It would be "the same issue" if we were talking about a small expense. But schooling is major and mandatory. Lower income families do not have an economic choice: they must send their kids to public school, no matter what.
All of them: curricula are politically determined, through legislatures and school boards.
I come from one of those countries whose public schools are supposedly very good; they aren't. Even if you look at something like the PISA study, the US is just fairly average, with the differences between countries not being all that large. European schools have the same kinds of problems that US schools do. When they work a little better (e.g., in Finland), it's due to social and cultural factors.
Law enforcement doesn't have to show up with vaccines on your doorstep in order to coerce you; they can arrest you, or take your stuff, or limit your freedom of movement, or whatever until you "choose" to get vaccinated. Those approaches are just as coercive as if they showed up with vaccines at your house.
Whether people who don't have any kids pay for the education of other people's kids, and how that education is delivered are two entirely separate issues. Regardless of where you stand on the first point, delivering education through a public school system with politically determined curricula and policies is increasingly failing.
The mortality rate from measles in the US is very low. Nominally, these days, it is 0.2%, but that already selects for an unhealthy population. Before vaccination, it was actually less than 0.1%. Measles is fatal at a significant rate only in malnourished and otherwise unhealthy populations. Saying that the measles virus might "mutate and go back to killing millions of people" is utterly ludicrous and unscientific. The reason we vaccinate against measles is because a cheap, safe, and effective vaccine became available, and because it reduces the number of sick days for children and prevents birth defects, not because it was some highly lethal disease. There have been some killer viruses that we have routinely vaccinated against (smallpox, polio), but measles isn't one of them.
Talking about "vaccines" as if they were all like the measles vaccine is completely unscientific. In fact, many vaccines are nowhere near as safe or effective as the measles vaccine.
It is sorely disappointing to see that someone educated in Germany believes that the government should be able to impose medical procedures on its citizens. The same arguments you make for the benefits of vaccination to society have been made by eugenicists; in fact, not just the same arguments, mandatory vaccinations have been cited as a legal precedent in allowing forced sterilizations. You should be ashamed of yourself.
"Obviously beneficial" to who? If a vaccine causes serious side effects in 1% of an animal herd, the "herd effect" can still be "obviously beneficial" to the rancher, we would not and should not accept such risks for human vaccines. "Herd immunity" isn't the simple concept that you assume it is.
Herd immunity depends on the details of how a disease is transmitted, how infections it is, what social groups are preferentially infected with it, and how they interact. So, in fact, you do have to prove for each disease that "herd immunity" actually works for that particular disease. Even then, there are several more things you have to establish, namely that the vaccine is essentially completely safe, highly effective, and cost-effective. Most known vaccines don't pass those tests, which is why only a small number of vaccines are actually routinely given. Even then, herd immunity often is not very useful: most of the people ostensibly protected through "herd immunity", namely people with weakened immune systems, are not helped significantly by a handful of common vaccines, since there are hundreds of viruses that are dangerous to them that we have no vaccine against.
Actually, that is only true for a few widely used vaccines; there are many vaccines that are quite risky, which is why they are not routinely given. In any case, even for the safest vaccines, you seem to think that "the only good reason" translates into "the decision should be taken out of the hands of individuals and be placed in the hands of doctors or experts". Sorry, that doesn't follow. My doctor may tell me that surgery or some drug the best treatment for some condition I have, but the decision of whether to go ahead with surgery or take that drug is still mine to make, not his. It's the same with vaccines.
There aren't "a lot of people" like that, there are a few people like that. And they already need to take precautions, because in addition to the handful of diseases that we have vaccines against, there are susceptible to thousands of viral and bacterial diseases that we don't have vaccines against. And as far as HPV is concerned, arguments about herd immunity are bullshit anyway, since the strains of HPV that Gardasil protects against aren't transmitted through casual contact.