My only "case" here was to point out that liberals aren't helping their own case because the right wing's hysterics are less detached from reality. The left demagogues are less competent than the right's demagogues. This is the truth, and I do not believe in holding one's tongue re: the truth in the service of some larger "case".
Are you an AI? Serious question. You've shot so far past the point I'm definitely not wasting a single minute of my time trying to guide you back to it.
I understand the historical connection of unions to leftist politics, but I've always wondered why no one tried to re-engineer and rebrand them as something that really embodies the free market stuff that the right-wingers are always going on about.
There's no particular reason to think of a union as fundamentally any different from the corporation that employs its members. In other words, just make it one corporation employing another corporation to do a job. More than a contractor, with the framework laid out so that it's effectively as if the union members (which is also the union's employees--the union's name would be on all of the paychecks) are working for the original employer. I've actually worked at a company that did this trick for liability reasons (not unionization), so I'm pretty sure it's legally possible.
So why don't union organizers use this technique as a loophole in "right to work" states that forbid membership dues? This bypasses those laws entirely. Your old employer pays the union and the union cuts the check to you with pass-through taxation (LLC or nonprofit or something.) You show up for work at the same place, the employees are all owners the union-corporation and the union-corporation negotiates with the employer for all of the things unions traditionally negotiate for, with all of the bargaining power that unions typically have, even if it's a right to work state.
That's interesting on its own to think about. But then I wonder about taking it a step further... first, you imagine for a moment if telecommuting can be more widely accepted, so that you could have a union of white collar workers who all telecommuted. Just for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that. Then, imagine there are guildlike union-corporations built on meritocracy and whatever other shared values and positive vibes that you think makes workers effective and pleasant to be around. If one employer starts giving you too much shit, well, the union starts shopping its collective resume around at other employers.
Obviously it isn't feasible without telecommuting (you can't expect the whole union to pick up and physically move around), but just imagine for a moment if that was a given. Imagine if you had an identity as a union-corporation, as a collection of self-selected workers. You provide a certain set of skills, you have a certain kind of people working there with a certain kind of workflow and workplace vibe, and as a union-corporation you have a certain reputation in the marketplace. And if you have a good reputation and your employer starts screwing you over, you have the option of moving to greener pastures, taking all of your coworkers with you without having to slog through the interview process yourself. Or the union can simply threaten to do this as part of the bargaining process. This all could be as cutthroat or as reasonable as you want it to be--different unions could have different philosophies. A union might have a reputation for stability and loyalty to its employer even in tough times (some of that loyalty might be written into the contracts as well), and some prospective employers might find that loyal stability attractive. Larger unions might have multiple partners they provide workers for.
It probably sounds like I'm describing a consulting firm or something, but this would be for real long term employment purposes, with "pass through" benefits paid for by the employer (and also hopefully pass through taxation via nonprofit or LLC status) and you'd interact with the employer's supervisors as you normally would. Employers would still have the ability to fire specific individuals, subject to whatever dispute resolution stuff the union has agreed to with them.
I know there are major hurdles preventing this from ever happening but as far as pipe dreams go, it feels like a pretty nice one. And I like it as a thought experiment because it really puts the question to anti-union conservatives: how is this hybrid corporate-union-firm setup in any way u
Aall you folks who think that it's only the right that engages in scaremongering and hyperbole and doesn't care about the facts... observe! Observe and be disillusioned.
Why do you think the USA will fall to "rampant crime and chaos very soon"? We survived the gangster Prohibition years and the huge violent crime wave of the 70s-80s. The last time I checked, crime levels today are nowhere near either of those eras (including minors being murdered).
The really worrying thing about the right-wing version of this sort of fear-mongering (*only* this sort... I'm not talking about the other sorts of rabble-rousing that they do--anti-communism, anti-transgender, other sex-scare shit, etc.)... is closer to reality than the mainstream left's fear-mongering.
What do I mean by that? Well:
1. There really is a huge messy, violent drug war going on in Northern Mexico (gang vs. gang and us vs. gangs and Mexican authorities vs. gangs and Mexican army vs. Mexican corrupt cops and it goes on and on ). Trump didn't make that up, and if you ask anyone who lives there they will tell you it's got significantly worse over the past 20 years. It's vicious and nihilistic and... very corrosive to civilization, I don't know how else to put it. it's significantly messed up Mexico's society and economy, and yeah some of that nastiness spills over into the USA. (See disclaimer below)
[Disclaimer: a physical wall is fucking retarded, amnesty for 'rooted' and law-abiding Dreamers is the only sane or humane thing to do, and as a left-libertarian I favor a lot of de-criminalization and de-escalating of the drug war, and of course the USA is a major part of the problem by leaning on Mexico so hard to fight our war on drugs--thus jacking up the prices and enabling the black market to flourish.]
2. Islamism movements in other countries, with associated issues of terrorism and caliphate restorationism and all that--*are* really fucking scary and they aren't going away. Poll results on what average citizens from Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Afghanistan or Pakistan believe, for instance, is really terrifying, especially if you look at the trend lines of the past few decades. (And even a "progressive" and "secular" country like Turkey still has poll results that are more conservative sounding than Texas.) Fox News will say stupid and bigoted things about Muslims, sure. "Not all Muslims blahblahblah", yes yes I agree. Sure.
But underneath the hate and the bullshit and the "othering" that you wring your hands over, there is a real story there. Fox News isn't making up something out of thin air when they talk about Islamism and jihad. Globally speaking, it really is much, much, much more serious and cancerous problem than, say, white supremacy. The evil ultra-conservative Islamists are in control of multiple governments. They have the ability to control the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they have militarizes. Bad and partisan rhetoric, but it's not a fantasy. Ditto the drug gangs in Mexico--not something Fox News made up whole cloth.
But YOU are making up something out of thin air when you predict the imminent collapse of American society (presumably) based on sensationlist reporting of shootings, despite the fact that things are much better than they were in the late twentieth century (and much MUCH better than they were in the early twentieth century.)
Yes, we have a murder rate that is too high for a "developed" nation and part of that is the availability of guns. But it's not a catastrophic problem. Car accidents still kill like 5x more people, the last time I checked. And despite what your echo chamber wants you to believe, it's not a growing problem.
Yea this is an overkill of a reply but I just wanted to point out... this is why it's so much cooler and sexier to be an outspoken right-winger than a left-winger these days. This is why there is still no "alt-left"... on so many issues, their hype machine remains woefully mis-calibrated.
Viral sinus infections do not cause intensely foul smelling mucus. Viral sinus infections don't last months. My mucus goes from dark colored to transparent in a matter of 48 hours after going on antibiotics, vs. having to wait weeks and weeks without, every time. Yes, I even had it cultured one time by an ENT doc; it was bacterial, though I forget what strain exactly.
Yeah antibiotic resistance is a big problem. (Never said it wasn't; I'm just annoyed at people trying to tell me that I don't need the medicine that very clearly works for the bacterial infection I very clearly wind up getting. I am aware of placebo effects. I routinely notice when medicine doesn't do what it's supposed to do, but mucus going from green-yellow to clear isn't something that's in my head. Also, I'm pretty sure I didn't have a bacterial infection the one day the ENT guy swabbed me and viral all the other times.)[1] But yes, that said, of course antibiotic resistance is a huge problem.
But infectious virals disease is, globally speaking, still a bigger problem. HPV is killing hundreds of thousands of women around the globe including thousands of Americans (and causing thousands more to suffer chemo, etc.) Actually, I bet HPV-caused cancers kill more people than MRSA in America. Hell, the flu probably kills more people. Both diseases are preventable with vaccines.
If the flu and HPV isn't sexy enough for you, they're working on an HIV vaccine right now. The world has enough denialism as it is. It's not "othering" to take a stand against deadly stupidity. Might as well tell people they're "othering" if they say they think Trump is dangerous. It's outrageous that we could have a measles outbreak in 2019. It should be extinct by now. A lot of these diseases should be, and could be, if we got more serious about it.
Look at it this way: the fewer viral infections there are, the fewer unnecessary antibiotic scripts that can be handed out.
classify antibiotics as a controlled substance, criminalize misuse
If that stood a chance of working I *might* be in favor of it since it really is a major problem (even if it meant I had to struggle through sinus infections with nothing but saline rinses for the rest of my life.). However, for a variety of reasons that really isn't realistically workable. Mandatory vaccines are workable. Normally, I don't think it should be a misdemeanor (in the middle of an outbreak I do think that's appropriate, though)--I'd much rather see strong financial incentives as well as segregating non-vaccinated kids in their own separate classroom--#1 it's not fair to the other kids to expose them, and #2 it drives home the point to the aggressively parents that this choice they are making is not without consequences.
We should work on designing more antibiotics and especially jump starting research on phage treatments (viruses that kill bacteria) which supposedly the Russians have made to work. Phages should not suffer the same resistance issues as antibiotics and even if they did, we could probably tweak them to start working again. They are tricky to work with and trying to fund research is tricky and the FDA hasn't been enthusiastic about them, but in lieu of a major antibiotic breakthrough, they may be our best hope for the future.
But almost no one bothers talking about them, even though the MRSA crisis gets worse and worse every year, because they're too busy spouting off pearls of insight like maybe this would all go away if only doctors would stop prescribing antibiotics for colds. Even if that was the original main culprit, it's too late. The horse is out of the barn. We need talk about actual long term solutions.
Vaccines are a solution to a real problem. So are phages. So are various ideas to spur on research to find novel antibiotics, maybe (assuming they're out there to be found.) I take strong pro-solution stands when experts and "the establishment" is for those solutions (vaccines),
Also, as others have noted it's more than just one or two American women who die each year from cervical cancer. It was a particularly sickening alliance of right-wingers (who cynically want to use the specter of STDs==>cancer to discourage premarital sex) and antivaxxers who came out against the HPV vaccine. Like HPV, measles is also a deadly disease. Unlike these hand-wringing ultra-libertarians, I *hoping* this sets a precedent.
It's not cherry-picked; it's long running and snowballing. I don't feel like waiting until millions of people are affected. Also, that's a lovely empathetic global view you have going on there.
I'm all for keeping it legal to stay unvaccinated it one or two states. They can move there if they really want to. Seriously, it's a big fucking deal going forward. Looking at just this one incident is insanely myopic. I don't want us to be having this debate as a culture when the stakes are actually super high. Antivaxxers have got as far as they have precisely because of politeness, because we haven't been treating it like a big deal that affects everyone. If you spent a couple years arguing with these asshats you might understand.
Antibiotics are required to get over sinus infections (without waiting over a month in misery), which I get almost every time I get a cold. People like to gloss over this simple reason why antibiotics were ever prescribed for colds to begin with, though I'm sure dumb/lazy doctors/patients are out there, that's not my fault. I suspect antibiotic resistance is more a product of widespread prophylactic use in agriculture and aquaculture.
People get uppity because 1) the downsides to vaccines is vanishingly small, 2) The upsides for society as a whole are large, 3) With most of these diseases, these are fights we could actually permanently win if enough people were vaccinated. Just like polio.
It's repugnant to think that humanity will be stuck with these diseases for all time because someone demands that their "right" to be paranoid/stupid isn't infringed. It is clear that we cannot win over all hearts and minds--the anti-vaxxers fight dirty. Very dirty. As a (left) libertarian, I really wish libertarians would find better issues to champion. This is one of the best possible examples of the government doing good by "trampling" on someone's "rights".
I think they're wagering most people aren't going to commit fraud or perjury or whatever just to weasel out of it. If that really becomes a thing that the antivaxxers start doing en masse, well, it'll certainly be interesting to see how it escalates.
He was pointing out natural selection was stacked against you. (Unfortunately, we can't wait that long.)
It's people like you who give libertarianism a bad name. If people like you and the antivaxxers had been around in the 1950s, we'd still be struggling with polio.
It's assholes like you that keep people from ever taking libertarianism seriously.
This is a good of humanity situation here. If there had been assholes like you and the anti-vaxxers back in the 1950s, polio would still be around. The government already mandates we do a lot of shit. A lot of this is flatly unnecessary and can be dismissed in the same tone of voice you just used. Vaccines isn't one of them. The onus is on you to explain why we, as a society, should allow deadly selfish recklessness when the costs/risks of getting vaccinated are so minuscule and when this is actually a war that someday be won, but only if we can get over 95% of people vaccinated.
If it were any "medical treatment" other than vaccinations, you'd have a point and the majority of people here would be on your side.
But it isn't and you don't, so they aren't.
Governments have been taking drastic measures to deal with infectious epidemics for thousands of years. This has been widely recognized as a necessary evil that is preferable to the evil of allowing selfish people to spread disease.
They'll figure it out as they go. I mean, that's a lazy answer but it's a complex question. Some places will scream bloody murder over it and thus we won't see driverless cars there. Ideally you have extensive sidewalks/bike paths. Some cities have those already.
In the end the advantages are too great to ignore, particularly after cars get all around cheaper and longer lasting when electric starts to really take off. Driverless ride sharing / Uber-like services are a big game changer as well and should make transportation viable even if you're fairly poor.
China has been known to suppress stories of accidents, including some rather major fires/explosions, if they don't want the public to overreact to it. China maybe more than any other country would strongly benefit from self-driving cars (Admittedly, they'll need to be able to handle lots and lots of bicyclers.)
Oh and the "alarmist" papers I'm referring to... none of them involve the apocalyptic sci fi nonsense that guys like you hint at. What's really amusing is how most of you don't even see fit to describe what you think the dangers are; you just have handwaving appeals to Murphy's law, obvious dangers...
I've seen the phrase "stuff like this never seems to work out" used so many times in regards to TOTALLY NEW genetic technologies that have never been tried in any way, shape or form and when you press the person for specifics, they either come back with bad science fiction or they come back with extremely inane comparisons (like comparing an obviously self-limiting gene drive eradication campaign of invasive nonnative mice to help save endangered species from extinction... to importing unmodified non-native cane toads to preserve crop yields by their predation on native beetles.)
There's no reason whatsoever for extreme caution. You've got nothing but hollow, atrophied groupthink, though of what type I couldn't say, since you wisely chose to keep the details of your paranoid pipe dreams to yourself.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. The "scientific community" firstly isn't as skittish as you imply, but to the extent they are of course they concerned worried about regulators and political correctness (specter of eugenics, etc.) The majority of scientists who aren't alarmists and aren't making their career by writing alarmist papers accept as inevitable that human genetic modification will occur.
The only real danger as I see is this: Kids grow up with some unforseen fucked up genetic disorder as a result of tampering, up to and including depression caused by excessive intelligence. That's it. Really, worse case it's pretty similar to letting a mother choosing not to abort a Down syndrome fetus.
Everything else is cringy hysterical blithering from people who have been exposed to far too much sloppily written sci fi and mistake it for "science fact". (Or else equally cringy blithering from SJWs who appear to honestly believe that giving parents choice over eye color would be tremendously socially damaging.)
Some of it borders on magical thinking. I have seen slashdotters unironically quote Jurassic Park's line "Life finds a way." Yes, this attitude is overtly Luddite and it's really cringy to see when supposed geeks exhibit it.
But please, go on and articulate plausible worst-case scenarios as you imagine them.
I had similar fears, though Tesla's Autopilot hasn't haven't been sunk yet even after multiple people have been killed. It's an audacious strategy they've appeared to adopt... by doing it piecemeal and insisting the driver needs to be paying attention at all times, they can hide from blame while using people to beta test.
I still think there's going to be a moral panic over it at some point, but that said, I think worse case scenario will be a delay. All it takes is one country to legalize it, then before long they'll experiment with declaring certain cities as driverless-only. The advantages will quickly become apparent--not just the convenience of not having to drive yourself and the massively improved safety, but also the reduced commutes as the cars are fine-tuned to time themselves perfectly with traffic lights (which will at some point be removed entirely, of course.) Taxis get cheap, long work commutes are no longer a chore...
Basically, it's going to be way too awesome to ignore and the resistance in other countries will fall away. Specifically, I think both Japan and China would be much less likely to overreact to self-driving car accidents. And in the case of the latter, the government obviously isn't as beholden to public opinion... "sometimes killing people" isn't as much of a hurdle for them.
(I have very similar theories about other areas that involve possible outcries and regulatory resistance, particularly human genetic engineering. Though that one could be much less visible.)
Musk didn't care about the money as much as he cared about the technology getting used. New overlord, new priorities,
Uh huh. This is the guy who was fired from Paypal (circa 2000) because he actually wanted to abandon their existing Linux infrastructure and migrate to Windows servers...
Yeah, some people will fall on their faces and some small tragedies will occur. (But nothing apocalyptic. You'd be surprised just how many people around here take an uncritical "Life finds a way!" fearmongering attitude towards genetic modifications. ANY genetic modifications.)
But the easiest, and probably the only, way to discover and work around those complexities you refer to is to run forward, fall down, then get back up again. The human race as a whole is simply not going to wait around for 500+ years while we try to figure out the secrets of epigenetics, build computers powerful enough to accurately simulate protein folding, etc.
Human history is full of fuckups and tragedies. The nasty surprises waiting for us re: human genetic modification is very unlikely to make the top 100 list.
What's stupid is how uppity the luddites get on a website full of people who really should know better. Genetics isn't that scary or dangerous (well, working with fast-multiplying microbes can sometimes be.)
What's dangerous is our current set of "ethics" and sense of sacredness when it comes to human DNA. The Chinese inner party doesn't give a fuck, and neither do Russian billionaires who want smart children. The improvement (or "improvement", if you prefer the scare quotes) of the human genome is going to happen... with or without us and our Jurassic Park-esque fears.
I think the understandability of the new form would be better than the old, because the old way ways "you can treat the derivative as a fraction, except not really (you can't do foo and bar)", which was confusing. Presumably the new form will simplify to the old representation in many cases (which is why the old way was used) and people will be able to understand this and understand when the old way would be sufficient.
That said, I haven't taken ordinary differential equations in eons and I'm not gonna brush up on it just to puzzle this one out, as interesting as it sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who don't want to hear this don't own the guns.
My only "case" here was to point out that liberals aren't helping their own case because the right wing's hysterics are less detached from reality. The left demagogues are less competent than the right's demagogues. This is the truth, and I do not believe in holding one's tongue re: the truth in the service of some larger "case".
not that slow of a typist. 6 seconds tops. this one 4
Are you an AI? Serious question. You've shot so far past the point I'm definitely not wasting a single minute of my time trying to guide you back to it.
I understand the historical connection of unions to leftist politics, but I've always wondered why no one tried to re-engineer and rebrand them as something that really embodies the free market stuff that the right-wingers are always going on about.
There's no particular reason to think of a union as fundamentally any different from the corporation that employs its members. In other words, just make it one corporation employing another corporation to do a job. More than a contractor, with the framework laid out so that it's effectively as if the union members (which is also the union's employees--the union's name would be on all of the paychecks) are working for the original employer. I've actually worked at a company that did this trick for liability reasons (not unionization), so I'm pretty sure it's legally possible.
So why don't union organizers use this technique as a loophole in "right to work" states that forbid membership dues? This bypasses those laws entirely. Your old employer pays the union and the union cuts the check to you with pass-through taxation (LLC or nonprofit or something.) You show up for work at the same place, the employees are all owners the union-corporation and the union-corporation negotiates with the employer for all of the things unions traditionally negotiate for, with all of the bargaining power that unions typically have, even if it's a right to work state.
That's interesting on its own to think about. But then I wonder about taking it a step further... first, you imagine for a moment if telecommuting can be more widely accepted, so that you could have a union of white collar workers who all telecommuted. Just for the sake of this thought experiment, imagine that. Then, imagine there are guildlike union-corporations built on meritocracy and whatever other shared values and positive vibes that you think makes workers effective and pleasant to be around. If one employer starts giving you too much shit, well, the union starts shopping its collective resume around at other employers. Obviously it isn't feasible without telecommuting (you can't expect the whole union to pick up and physically move around), but just imagine for a moment if that was a given. Imagine if you had an identity as a union-corporation, as a collection of self-selected workers. You provide a certain set of skills, you have a certain kind of people working there with a certain kind of workflow and workplace vibe, and as a union-corporation you have a certain reputation in the marketplace. And if you have a good reputation and your employer starts screwing you over, you have the option of moving to greener pastures, taking all of your coworkers with you without having to slog through the interview process yourself. Or the union can simply threaten to do this as part of the bargaining process. This all could be as cutthroat or as reasonable as you want it to be--different unions could have different philosophies. A union might have a reputation for stability and loyalty to its employer even in tough times (some of that loyalty might be written into the contracts as well), and some prospective employers might find that loyal stability attractive. Larger unions might have multiple partners they provide workers for.
It probably sounds like I'm describing a consulting firm or something, but this would be for real long term employment purposes, with "pass through" benefits paid for by the employer (and also hopefully pass through taxation via nonprofit or LLC status) and you'd interact with the employer's supervisors as you normally would. Employers would still have the ability to fire specific individuals, subject to whatever dispute resolution stuff the union has agreed to with them.
I know there are major hurdles preventing this from ever happening but as far as pipe dreams go, it feels like a pretty nice one. And I like it as a thought experiment because it really puts the question to anti-union conservatives: how is this hybrid corporate-union-firm setup in any way u
Aall you folks who think that it's only the right that engages in scaremongering and hyperbole and doesn't care about the facts... observe! Observe and be disillusioned.
... is closer to reality than the mainstream left's fear-mongering.
Why do you think the USA will fall to "rampant crime and chaos very soon"? We survived the gangster Prohibition years and the huge violent crime wave of the 70s-80s. The last time I checked, crime levels today are nowhere near either of those eras (including minors being murdered).
The really worrying thing about the right-wing version of this sort of fear-mongering (*only* this sort... I'm not talking about the other sorts of rabble-rousing that they do--anti-communism, anti-transgender, other sex-scare shit, etc.)
What do I mean by that? Well: 1. There really is a huge messy, violent drug war going on in Northern Mexico (gang vs. gang and us vs. gangs and Mexican authorities vs. gangs and Mexican army vs. Mexican corrupt cops and it goes on and on ). Trump didn't make that up, and if you ask anyone who lives there they will tell you it's got significantly worse over the past 20 years. It's vicious and nihilistic and... very corrosive to civilization, I don't know how else to put it. it's significantly messed up Mexico's society and economy, and yeah some of that nastiness spills over into the USA. (See disclaimer below)
[Disclaimer: a physical wall is fucking retarded, amnesty for 'rooted' and law-abiding Dreamers is the only sane or humane thing to do, and as a left-libertarian I favor a lot of de-criminalization and de-escalating of the drug war, and of course the USA is a major part of the problem by leaning on Mexico so hard to fight our war on drugs--thus jacking up the prices and enabling the black market to flourish.]
2. Islamism movements in other countries, with associated issues of terrorism and caliphate restorationism and all that--*are* really fucking scary and they aren't going away. Poll results on what average citizens from Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Afghanistan or Pakistan believe, for instance, is really terrifying, especially if you look at the trend lines of the past few decades. (And even a "progressive" and "secular" country like Turkey still has poll results that are more conservative sounding than Texas.) Fox News will say stupid and bigoted things about Muslims, sure. "Not all Muslims blahblahblah", yes yes I agree. Sure.
But underneath the hate and the bullshit and the "othering" that you wring your hands over, there is a real story there. Fox News isn't making up something out of thin air when they talk about Islamism and jihad. Globally speaking, it really is much, much, much more serious and cancerous problem than, say, white supremacy. The evil ultra-conservative Islamists are in control of multiple governments. They have the ability to control the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and they have militarizes. Bad and partisan rhetoric, but it's not a fantasy. Ditto the drug gangs in Mexico--not something Fox News made up whole cloth.
But YOU are making up something out of thin air when you predict the imminent collapse of American society (presumably) based on sensationlist reporting of shootings, despite the fact that things are much better than they were in the late twentieth century (and much MUCH better than they were in the early twentieth century.)
Yes, we have a murder rate that is too high for a "developed" nation and part of that is the availability of guns. But it's not a catastrophic problem. Car accidents still kill like 5x more people, the last time I checked. And despite what your echo chamber wants you to believe, it's not a growing problem.
Yea this is an overkill of a reply but I just wanted to point out... this is why it's so much cooler and sexier to be an outspoken right-winger than a left-winger these days. This is why there is still no "alt-left"... on so many issues, their hype machine remains woefully mis-calibrated.
Yeah antibiotic resistance is a big problem. (Never said it wasn't; I'm just annoyed at people trying to tell me that I don't need the medicine that very clearly works for the bacterial infection I very clearly wind up getting. I am aware of placebo effects. I routinely notice when medicine doesn't do what it's supposed to do, but mucus going from green-yellow to clear isn't something that's in my head. Also, I'm pretty sure I didn't have a bacterial infection the one day the ENT guy swabbed me and viral all the other times.)[1] But yes, that said, of course antibiotic resistance is a huge problem.
But infectious virals disease is, globally speaking, still a bigger problem. HPV is killing hundreds of thousands of women around the globe including thousands of Americans (and causing thousands more to suffer chemo, etc.) Actually, I bet HPV-caused cancers kill more people than MRSA in America. Hell, the flu probably kills more people. Both diseases are preventable with vaccines.
If the flu and HPV isn't sexy enough for you, they're working on an HIV vaccine right now. The world has enough denialism as it is. It's not "othering" to take a stand against deadly stupidity. Might as well tell people they're "othering" if they say they think Trump is dangerous. It's outrageous that we could have a measles outbreak in 2019. It should be extinct by now. A lot of these diseases should be, and could be, if we got more serious about it.
Look at it this way: the fewer viral infections there are, the fewer unnecessary antibiotic scripts that can be handed out.
classify antibiotics as a controlled substance, criminalize misuse
If that stood a chance of working I *might* be in favor of it since it really is a major problem (even if it meant I had to struggle through sinus infections with nothing but saline rinses for the rest of my life.). However, for a variety of reasons that really isn't realistically workable. Mandatory vaccines are workable. Normally, I don't think it should be a misdemeanor (in the middle of an outbreak I do think that's appropriate, though)--I'd much rather see strong financial incentives as well as segregating non-vaccinated kids in their own separate classroom--#1 it's not fair to the other kids to expose them, and #2 it drives home the point to the aggressively parents that this choice they are making is not without consequences.
We should work on designing more antibiotics and especially jump starting research on phage treatments (viruses that kill bacteria) which supposedly the Russians have made to work. Phages should not suffer the same resistance issues as antibiotics and even if they did, we could probably tweak them to start working again. They are tricky to work with and trying to fund research is tricky and the FDA hasn't been enthusiastic about them, but in lieu of a major antibiotic breakthrough, they may be our best hope for the future.
But almost no one bothers talking about them, even though the MRSA crisis gets worse and worse every year, because they're too busy spouting off pearls of insight like maybe this would all go away if only doctors would stop prescribing antibiotics for colds. Even if that was the original main culprit, it's too late. The horse is out of the barn. We need talk about actual long term solutions.
Vaccines are a solution to a real problem. So are phages. So are various ideas to spur on research to find novel antibiotics, maybe (assuming they're out there to be found.) I take strong pro-solution stands when experts and "the establishment" is for those solutions (vaccines),
Also, as others have noted it's more than just one or two American women who die each year from cervical cancer. It was a particularly sickening alliance of right-wingers (who cynically want to use the specter of STDs==>cancer to discourage premarital sex) and antivaxxers who came out against the HPV vaccine. Like HPV, measles is also a deadly disease. Unlike these hand-wringing ultra-libertarians, I *hoping* this sets a precedent.
It's not cherry-picked; it's long running and snowballing. I don't feel like waiting until millions of people are affected. Also, that's a lovely empathetic global view you have going on there.
I'm all for keeping it legal to stay unvaccinated it one or two states. They can move there if they really want to. Seriously, it's a big fucking deal going forward. Looking at just this one incident is insanely myopic. I don't want us to be having this debate as a culture when the stakes are actually super high. Antivaxxers have got as far as they have precisely because of politeness, because we haven't been treating it like a big deal that affects everyone. If you spent a couple years arguing with these asshats you might understand.
Antibiotics are required to get over sinus infections (without waiting over a month in misery), which I get almost every time I get a cold. People like to gloss over this simple reason why antibiotics were ever prescribed for colds to begin with, though I'm sure dumb/lazy doctors/patients are out there, that's not my fault. I suspect antibiotic resistance is more a product of widespread prophylactic use in agriculture and aquaculture.
People get uppity because 1) the downsides to vaccines is vanishingly small, 2) The upsides for society as a whole are large, 3) With most of these diseases, these are fights we could actually permanently win if enough people were vaccinated. Just like polio.
It's repugnant to think that humanity will be stuck with these diseases for all time because someone demands that their "right" to be paranoid/stupid isn't infringed. It is clear that we cannot win over all hearts and minds--the anti-vaxxers fight dirty. Very dirty. As a (left) libertarian, I really wish libertarians would find better issues to champion. This is one of the best possible examples of the government doing good by "trampling" on someone's "rights".
Except it's not really a strawman. Others here have already compared it to Nazi Germany.
I think they're wagering most people aren't going to commit fraud or perjury or whatever just to weasel out of it. If that really becomes a thing that the antivaxxers start doing en masse, well, it'll certainly be interesting to see how it escalates.
He was pointing out natural selection was stacked against you. (Unfortunately, we can't wait that long.)
It's people like you who give libertarianism a bad name. If people like you and the antivaxxers had been around in the 1950s, we'd still be struggling with polio.
It's assholes like you that keep people from ever taking libertarianism seriously.
This is a good of humanity situation here. If there had been assholes like you and the anti-vaxxers back in the 1950s, polio would still be around. The government already mandates we do a lot of shit. A lot of this is flatly unnecessary and can be dismissed in the same tone of voice you just used. Vaccines isn't one of them. The onus is on you to explain why we, as a society, should allow deadly selfish recklessness when the costs/risks of getting vaccinated are so minuscule and when this is actually a war that someday be won, but only if we can get over 95% of people vaccinated.
If it were any "medical treatment" other than vaccinations, you'd have a point and the majority of people here would be on your side.
But it isn't and you don't, so they aren't.
Governments have been taking drastic measures to deal with infectious epidemics for thousands of years. This has been widely recognized as a necessary evil that is preferable to the evil of allowing selfish people to spread disease.
They'll figure it out as they go. I mean, that's a lazy answer but it's a complex question. Some places will scream bloody murder over it and thus we won't see driverless cars there. Ideally you have extensive sidewalks/bike paths. Some cities have those already.
In the end the advantages are too great to ignore, particularly after cars get all around cheaper and longer lasting when electric starts to really take off. Driverless ride sharing / Uber-like services are a big game changer as well and should make transportation viable even if you're fairly poor.
China has been known to suppress stories of accidents, including some rather major fires/explosions, if they don't want the public to overreact to it. China maybe more than any other country would strongly benefit from self-driving cars (Admittedly, they'll need to be able to handle lots and lots of bicyclers.)
Oh and the "alarmist" papers I'm referring to... none of them involve the apocalyptic sci fi nonsense that guys like you hint at. What's really amusing is how most of you don't even see fit to describe what you think the dangers are; you just have handwaving appeals to Murphy's law, obvious dangers...
I've seen the phrase "stuff like this never seems to work out" used so many times in regards to TOTALLY NEW genetic technologies that have never been tried in any way, shape or form and when you press the person for specifics, they either come back with bad science fiction or they come back with extremely inane comparisons (like comparing an obviously self-limiting gene drive eradication campaign of invasive nonnative mice to help save endangered species from extinction... to importing unmodified non-native cane toads to preserve crop yields by their predation on native beetles.)
There's no reason whatsoever for extreme caution. You've got nothing but hollow, atrophied groupthink, though of what type I couldn't say, since you wisely chose to keep the details of your paranoid pipe dreams to yourself.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. The "scientific community" firstly isn't as skittish as you imply, but to the extent they are of course they concerned worried about regulators and political correctness (specter of eugenics, etc.) The majority of scientists who aren't alarmists and aren't making their career by writing alarmist papers accept as inevitable that human genetic modification will occur.
The only real danger as I see is this: Kids grow up with some unforseen fucked up genetic disorder as a result of tampering, up to and including depression caused by excessive intelligence. That's it. Really, worse case it's pretty similar to letting a mother choosing not to abort a Down syndrome fetus.
Everything else is cringy hysterical blithering from people who have been exposed to far too much sloppily written sci fi and mistake it for "science fact". (Or else equally cringy blithering from SJWs who appear to honestly believe that giving parents choice over eye color would be tremendously socially damaging.)
Some of it borders on magical thinking. I have seen slashdotters unironically quote Jurassic Park's line "Life finds a way." Yes, this attitude is overtly Luddite and it's really cringy to see when supposed geeks exhibit it.
But please, go on and articulate plausible worst-case scenarios as you imagine them.
I had similar fears, though Tesla's Autopilot hasn't haven't been sunk yet even after multiple people have been killed. It's an audacious strategy they've appeared to adopt... by doing it piecemeal and insisting the driver needs to be paying attention at all times, they can hide from blame while using people to beta test.
I still think there's going to be a moral panic over it at some point, but that said, I think worse case scenario will be a delay. All it takes is one country to legalize it, then before long they'll experiment with declaring certain cities as driverless-only. The advantages will quickly become apparent--not just the convenience of not having to drive yourself and the massively improved safety, but also the reduced commutes as the cars are fine-tuned to time themselves perfectly with traffic lights (which will at some point be removed entirely, of course.) Taxis get cheap, long work commutes are no longer a chore...
Basically, it's going to be way too awesome to ignore and the resistance in other countries will fall away. Specifically, I think both Japan and China would be much less likely to overreact to self-driving car accidents. And in the case of the latter, the government obviously isn't as beholden to public opinion... "sometimes killing people" isn't as much of a hurdle for them.
(I have very similar theories about other areas that involve possible outcries and regulatory resistance, particularly human genetic engineering. Though that one could be much less visible.)
Musk didn't care about the money as much as he cared about the technology getting used. New overlord, new priorities,
Uh huh. This is the guy who was fired from Paypal (circa 2000) because he actually wanted to abandon their existing Linux infrastructure and migrate to Windows servers...
Yeah, some people will fall on their faces and some small tragedies will occur. (But nothing apocalyptic. You'd be surprised just how many people around here take an uncritical "Life finds a way!" fearmongering attitude towards genetic modifications. ANY genetic modifications.)
But the easiest, and probably the only, way to discover and work around those complexities you refer to is to run forward, fall down, then get back up again. The human race as a whole is simply not going to wait around for 500+ years while we try to figure out the secrets of epigenetics, build computers powerful enough to accurately simulate protein folding, etc.
Human history is full of fuckups and tragedies. The nasty surprises waiting for us re: human genetic modification is very unlikely to make the top 100 list.
What's stupid is how uppity the luddites get on a website full of people who really should know better. Genetics isn't that scary or dangerous (well, working with fast-multiplying microbes can sometimes be.)
What's dangerous is our current set of "ethics" and sense of sacredness when it comes to human DNA. The Chinese inner party doesn't give a fuck, and neither do Russian billionaires who want smart children. The improvement (or "improvement", if you prefer the scare quotes) of the human genome is going to happen... with or without us and our Jurassic Park-esque fears.
I think the understandability of the new form would be better than the old, because the old way ways "you can treat the derivative as a fraction, except not really (you can't do foo and bar)", which was confusing. Presumably the new form will simplify to the old representation in many cases (which is why the old way was used) and people will be able to understand this and understand when the old way would be sufficient.
That said, I haven't taken ordinary differential equations in eons and I'm not gonna brush up on it just to puzzle this one out, as interesting as it sounds.