I can understand the sentiment, but that's not how science works. Many of the smokers and former smokers with COPD and lung cancer that I helped treat in hospitals and nursing homes thought the same as you. There are few situations more depressing than being reliant on supplemental oxygen to be able to breathe at rest and still not being able to get enough air to walk 10 feet to the bathroom without being terrified of passing out. The sound of people desperately struggling to get air really stuck with me...
But I sincerely wish you the best with avoiding issues like that in the future. They're life-changing:(
Hopefully genetic testing will help give people more accurate personal risk assessments in the next few decades.
I haven't read further to see if they controlled for latent effects of prior smoking (which would presumably explain most of the increased risk for the subset of vapers who had switched from smoking to vaping), but researchers recently found that people who vape (but don't smoke) had a 71% higher risk of stroke, 59% higher risk of heart attack or angina, and 40 percent higher risk of heart disease.
The sample size is impressive: "The researchers included nearly 66,800 people who said they had ever regularly used e-cigarettes, comparing them with about 344,000 people who'd never tried the devices."
And they controlled for some major factors: "The increased health risks linked to e-cigarette use held strong even after Ndunda and his colleagues accounted for other potential risk factors, such as age, excess weight, diabetes and smoking."
But this study would be far more compelling if it compared people who vape but have not smoked to people who do neither. I hope you found it interesting anyway.
That's a great point for this particular fire and some others. But the idea is that climate change is increasing the intensity of most fires in the state regardless of who starts them. Major (often record breaking) fires seem to happen every year. And climate change has led to those fires being much larger and damaging/expensive than before.
Those are good points. I strongly dislike where they're headed with those ideas. The marketing against those industries seems to hit new moms especially hard since things like organic, non-GMO, and natural remedy businesses frame shunning the status quo for their products as being healthier. They suggest that parents are hurting or even killing their children if they don't make the switch, and people on all sides don't do enough research to be less vulnerable to that. The right ignores science for a lot of fields/areas, but I stand with them on the topics you mentioned and am glad to have them as allies.
Thank you for pointing that out to me.
I'm surprised that the list doesn't seem to appear in the study itself, which appears to be much more expansive. I'm guessing that it was because it was only a small part of how they identified domains with a tendency to share objectively false information. The link still shows a clear distinction between objective falsehood and opinion and persuasion pieces, but I sure hope that a lot of pieces labeled real news were borderline as if to be examples of things that sound fake/useless but are at least supported by their authors with facts instead of lies. It's depressing that content like that is shared so much more prolifically than content without a narrative, but I can understand why it is. The arguments can be compelling, but pieces like that typically leave a lot out that moderates and "the other side" wish would be there.
I'm thankful that most people I'm close to who are in the 65 and over age group don't post to Facebook; but the number and extremity of falsehoods in e-mails some of them forward is astounding. Right-leaning organizations are far better (or less morally inhibited) than left-leaning organizations when it comes to targeting elderly people with fearmongering falsehoods. I've seen some pretty out-there anti-Trump stuff too, but that mostly comes across as overly hopeful instead of being filled with blatant lies designed to inspire fear and distrust of large groups of people.
You should read the actual study if you think it's based on who Buzzfeed doesn't like instead of on what is objectively blatantly false. Have some integrity.
Did you expect the websites to be up forever with no repercussions for the site owners? It's still possible to sue for libel, you know?
They made their excellent profits and moved on. And now that organizations care more about fact checking, those sites have been banned from most social media sites for having too many blatantly false stories. Spreading obvious lies for clicks doesn't pay as well as it used to on those platforms.
Where is that cited? I didn't go into extreme detail, but I didn't see anything like that when reading the study. I didn't even see a list of "real news"
I agree that opinion pieces can be a big problem, especially if not clearly labeled "opinion." Major networks are getting better about including that word in titles, but they're penalized for doing so since most of their competition doesn't and gets more views for skipping it. I prefer most of my news to be objective with minimal bias, but I also appreciate the occasional (especially legal) analysis / "so what?" following a story. But even "opinion pieces" from the sources you listed are consistently backed by facts, usually organized into persuasive essays, instead of made up lies that would make them actually fake. Biased, sure. But not fake. It's not honest to act like those are equivalent or nearly equivalent to actual fake news, especially after seeing how blatantly fake news had to be to be labeled as fake in the study.
It's looking to me like researchers have been able to dissolve plaques in the brain as well but that patients didn't benefit. I agree that the mechanical stimulation from ultrasound could be a potential game changer, but I'll still keep my hopes low. Here's some information about a drug called Verubecestat. The second link unfortunately requires an account to be able to read it.
"The Phase 1 trial, reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine, recruited just 32 patients and was chiefly concerned with dosage and safety. However the trial showed that amyloid was reduced nearly entirely in some cases, and the effect increased with higher doses."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sc...
"In their article, Michael Egan, MD, of Merck Research Laboratories, and colleagues note that despite a 'near-maximal' reduction in amyloid-beta (A) in cerebrospinal fluid and a 'modest' reduction in brain amyloid load after 78 weeks of treatment with verubecestat, the drug was not effective in slowing the clinical progression of mild to moderate AD.
'This suggests that once dementia is present, disease progression may be independent of A production or, alternatively, that the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease may not be correct,' they offer."
https://www.medscape.com/viewa...
Sure. Here's a link from a quick Google search:
https://consumer.healthday.com...
There were other drugs with the same target in at least a few other companies' research pipelines at the time, but they all ended up also fizzling out without results. This particular link is suggesting that it might slow progression, but I was under the impression that that wasn't correct either for most people with the condition. Most pharmaceutical companies have moved on to looking at tau.
Clinical medication/drug trials have repeatedly shown that removing amyloid clusters doesn't reverse dementia and usually doesn't even slow its progression. I won't get my hopes up, but it'd be wonderful if things go better this time. The target seems strange, but it sounds like there might be a little more to this approach.
Interesting to read your perspective. Thanks for sharing it. And thanks for changing your ways!
If you happen to see this, I'd be curious to know your perspective: Do you think that the posts are mostly people doing it for kicks or that many are made to polarize people by exaggerating opposing views to a disagreeable/assholish level? There's so much "alt right" hate speech and completely offtopic "far left" Trump bashing that it feels much more like manipulation than peoples' actual views. It's in-line with Russia's tactics, but I wouldn't have expected them to target this site.
That made me smile. Predictions/recommendations based on location history and patterns really could be great for people with memory problems. A simple listing of frequently visited locations could be very helpful to some people (ex: Oh right! I was also going to stop by the store!).
I assume that my Android phone does pretty much all of this already anyway. It doesn't feel like something that other popular apps haven't already done before, and it instead feels more like advertising basics that take a huge amount of data collection and processing to be effective. I'm often impressed by how appropriate/accurate suggestions/predictions can get with enough data points to analyze, and suggestions should improve drastically over time. I'm glad that such information seems to be used mostly for good or neutral purposes so far, but it's easy to imagine not tolerating data collection like this in the future. And it's also easy to imagine very accurate suggestions leading to bubble-like effects where people see or go to more of what they already like instead of being exposed to more of the world. People will like it, but it might not be good for society unless it's countered by something else.
Morning darkness is a significant problem, but there should be far fewer accidents during the after-work commute and holiday shopping if year-round DST is enacted. I suspect that there would be fewer accidents overall, but it's hard to really know.
You understand that actions have consequences, right? That actual things are actually happening? People do worry about things like more people dying if Republicans actually managed to repeal the affordable care act and from too little action with the opioid epidemic when everyone who has knowledge of the issue begs the president to declare a state of emergency over it so they could take more action to prevent more people from dying needlessly. They worry about the immense trauma that tens of thousands of migrants and their children are being put through and the post-traumatic stress that they will be left with. They worry about the reality of international bodies finding the U.S. guilty inhumane treatment and the destruction of international trust and goodwill that the U.S. had since benefited from. And they worry about extremists from all sides being emboldened by his regular hate speech and the dramatic increase in mass shooting fatalities and hate crimes and hate speech that followed. Sure, some of the complaining from news networks is bullshit for annoying political reasons, but a damn lot of the things they worried about came true and have worsened the quality of life and safety of tens of millions of people in this country. Shit's real.
Except Trump blatantly lies daily while journalists from major news sources tend to be accurate and only rarely need significant retractions/corrections. They have bias in what they choose to report and which details they focus on, but they rarely outright lie like Trump does. They're playing different games.
You're right that greed/manipulation is the bigger issue, but they're both real threats. Trump, trolls, and Russia's propaganda campaigns directly harassing people (especially to extreme degrees) hurts peoples' hope/respect for humanity and erodes their trust in fellow humans which leads to more people cheating to get ahead instead of being considerate toward their neighbors. Exaggerated negative comments lead people to assume the worst and polarize people against their fellow citizens and create more extremists on both sides. I see that as a real threat.
(Extremism from all sides is a major problem too, but at least that's sincere instead of purely meant to pit people against each other)
Good news! You are mistaken in thinking that the forms at the DMV are the same for everyone. Non-citizens file forms that do not come with automatic voter registration, and they are not able to register to vote with the non-citizen versions of those IDs. However, this may only be true for California (the state we were talking about). Perhaps it sometimes happens in other states like you suggested.
"While it’s true that undocumented residents living in California can obtain driver’s licenses, the state has not passed any laws that also provide them the right to vote. The New Motor Voter Act was passed in an effort to improve voter turnout, and while this law does automatically register citizens to vote when they obtain or renew their driver’s licenses, that action only applies to citizens who have already attested and/or documented an eligibility to vote."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
And for the San Francisco school board elections, it sounds like you may be assuming that non-citizens will get a general ballot for state/federal elections instead of a ballot specific to the school board elections. Can't vote for something like congressperson or president if those aren't even fields on the ballot.
I don't see an option to mandate receiving only "private" payments and to block "public" payments, but I was able to set payments I send to "private" by default in the privacy settings, and that change made the service somewhat less annoying.
I wish that "private" would be the default payment setting upon first installing the app, but then they would lose what sets them apart from similar services.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand the sentiment, but that's not how science works. Many of the smokers and former smokers with COPD and lung cancer that I helped treat in hospitals and nursing homes thought the same as you. There are few situations more depressing than being reliant on supplemental oxygen to be able to breathe at rest and still not being able to get enough air to walk 10 feet to the bathroom without being terrified of passing out. The sound of people desperately struggling to get air really stuck with me...
:(
But I sincerely wish you the best with avoiding issues like that in the future. They're life-changing
Hopefully genetic testing will help give people more accurate personal risk assessments in the next few decades.
In other news, this story was posted today:
https://www.webmd.com/smoking-...
I haven't read further to see if they controlled for latent effects of prior smoking (which would presumably explain most of the increased risk for the subset of vapers who had switched from smoking to vaping), but researchers recently found that people who vape (but don't smoke) had a 71% higher risk of stroke, 59% higher risk of heart attack or angina, and 40 percent higher risk of heart disease.
The sample size is impressive: "The researchers included nearly 66,800 people who said they had ever regularly used e-cigarettes, comparing them with about 344,000 people who'd never tried the devices."
And they controlled for some major factors: "The increased health risks linked to e-cigarette use held strong even after Ndunda and his colleagues accounted for other potential risk factors, such as age, excess weight, diabetes and smoking."
But this study would be far more compelling if it compared people who vape but have not smoked to people who do neither. I hope you found it interesting anyway.
That's a great point for this particular fire and some others. But the idea is that climate change is increasing the intensity of most fires in the state regardless of who starts them. Major (often record breaking) fires seem to happen every year. And climate change has led to those fires being much larger and damaging/expensive than before.
I had to remove a ")" character from the end of that link to read it, but it was fascinating. Thanks for sharing it!
Those are good points. I strongly dislike where they're headed with those ideas. The marketing against those industries seems to hit new moms especially hard since things like organic, non-GMO, and natural remedy businesses frame shunning the status quo for their products as being healthier. They suggest that parents are hurting or even killing their children if they don't make the switch, and people on all sides don't do enough research to be less vulnerable to that. The right ignores science for a lot of fields/areas, but I stand with them on the topics you mentioned and am glad to have them as allies.
Thank you for pointing that out to me.
I'm surprised that the list doesn't seem to appear in the study itself, which appears to be much more expansive. I'm guessing that it was because it was only a small part of how they identified domains with a tendency to share objectively false information. The link still shows a clear distinction between objective falsehood and opinion and persuasion pieces, but I sure hope that a lot of pieces labeled real news were borderline as if to be examples of things that sound fake/useless but are at least supported by their authors with facts instead of lies. It's depressing that content like that is shared so much more prolifically than content without a narrative, but I can understand why it is. The arguments can be compelling, but pieces like that typically leave a lot out that moderates and "the other side" wish would be there.
I'm thankful that most people I'm close to who are in the 65 and over age group don't post to Facebook; but the number and extremity of falsehoods in e-mails some of them forward is astounding. Right-leaning organizations are far better (or less morally inhibited) than left-leaning organizations when it comes to targeting elderly people with fearmongering falsehoods. I've seen some pretty out-there anti-Trump stuff too, but that mostly comes across as overly hopeful instead of being filled with blatant lies designed to inspire fear and distrust of large groups of people.
You should read the actual study if you think it's based on who Buzzfeed doesn't like instead of on what is objectively blatantly false. Have some integrity.
Did you expect the websites to be up forever with no repercussions for the site owners? It's still possible to sue for libel, you know?
They made their excellent profits and moved on. And now that organizations care more about fact checking, those sites have been banned from most social media sites for having too many blatantly false stories. Spreading obvious lies for clicks doesn't pay as well as it used to on those platforms.
Where is that cited? I didn't go into extreme detail, but I didn't see anything like that when reading the study. I didn't even see a list of "real news"
I agree that opinion pieces can be a big problem, especially if not clearly labeled "opinion." Major networks are getting better about including that word in titles, but they're penalized for doing so since most of their competition doesn't and gets more views for skipping it. I prefer most of my news to be objective with minimal bias, but I also appreciate the occasional (especially legal) analysis / "so what?" following a story. But even "opinion pieces" from the sources you listed are consistently backed by facts, usually organized into persuasive essays, instead of made up lies that would make them actually fake. Biased, sure. But not fake. It's not honest to act like those are equivalent or nearly equivalent to actual fake news, especially after seeing how blatantly fake news had to be to be labeled as fake in the study.
It's looking to me like researchers have been able to dissolve plaques in the brain as well but that patients didn't benefit. I agree that the mechanical stimulation from ultrasound could be a potential game changer, but I'll still keep my hopes low. Here's some information about a drug called Verubecestat. The second link unfortunately requires an account to be able to read it.
"The Phase 1 trial, reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine, recruited just 32 patients and was chiefly concerned with dosage and safety. However the trial showed that amyloid was reduced nearly entirely in some cases, and the effect increased with higher doses."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sc...
"In their article, Michael Egan, MD, of Merck Research Laboratories, and colleagues note that despite a 'near-maximal' reduction in amyloid-beta (A) in cerebrospinal fluid and a 'modest' reduction in brain amyloid load after 78 weeks of treatment with verubecestat, the drug was not effective in slowing the clinical progression of mild to moderate AD.
'This suggests that once dementia is present, disease progression may be independent of A production or, alternatively, that the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease may not be correct,' they offer."
https://www.medscape.com/viewa...
Sure. Here's a link from a quick Google search:
https://consumer.healthday.com...
There were other drugs with the same target in at least a few other companies' research pipelines at the time, but they all ended up also fizzling out without results. This particular link is suggesting that it might slow progression, but I was under the impression that that wasn't correct either for most people with the condition. Most pharmaceutical companies have moved on to looking at tau.
Clinical medication/drug trials have repeatedly shown that removing amyloid clusters doesn't reverse dementia and usually doesn't even slow its progression. I won't get my hopes up, but it'd be wonderful if things go better this time. The target seems strange, but it sounds like there might be a little more to this approach.
Interesting to read your perspective. Thanks for sharing it. And thanks for changing your ways!
If you happen to see this, I'd be curious to know your perspective: Do you think that the posts are mostly people doing it for kicks or that many are made to polarize people by exaggerating opposing views to a disagreeable/assholish level? There's so much "alt right" hate speech and completely offtopic "far left" Trump bashing that it feels much more like manipulation than peoples' actual views. It's in-line with Russia's tactics, but I wouldn't have expected them to target this site.
That made me smile. Predictions/recommendations based on location history and patterns really could be great for people with memory problems. A simple listing of frequently visited locations could be very helpful to some people (ex: Oh right! I was also going to stop by the store!).
I assume that my Android phone does pretty much all of this already anyway. It doesn't feel like something that other popular apps haven't already done before, and it instead feels more like advertising basics that take a huge amount of data collection and processing to be effective. I'm often impressed by how appropriate/accurate suggestions/predictions can get with enough data points to analyze, and suggestions should improve drastically over time. I'm glad that such information seems to be used mostly for good or neutral purposes so far, but it's easy to imagine not tolerating data collection like this in the future. And it's also easy to imagine very accurate suggestions leading to bubble-like effects where people see or go to more of what they already like instead of being exposed to more of the world. People will like it, but it might not be good for society unless it's countered by something else.
Morning darkness is a significant problem, but there should be far fewer accidents during the after-work commute and holiday shopping if year-round DST is enacted. I suspect that there would be fewer accidents overall, but it's hard to really know.
It's clear that you didn't even look at the article. Look at the examples of posts made by the pages that were taken down and you'll have your answer.
Are you blaming the Saudis for Elon Musk blatantly breaking the law with his market-manipulating Twitter post? Or are you referring to something else?
You understand that actions have consequences, right? That actual things are actually happening? People do worry about things like more people dying if Republicans actually managed to repeal the affordable care act and from too little action with the opioid epidemic when everyone who has knowledge of the issue begs the president to declare a state of emergency over it so they could take more action to prevent more people from dying needlessly. They worry about the immense trauma that tens of thousands of migrants and their children are being put through and the post-traumatic stress that they will be left with. They worry about the reality of international bodies finding the U.S. guilty inhumane treatment and the destruction of international trust and goodwill that the U.S. had since benefited from. And they worry about extremists from all sides being emboldened by his regular hate speech and the dramatic increase in mass shooting fatalities and hate crimes and hate speech that followed. Sure, some of the complaining from news networks is bullshit for annoying political reasons, but a damn lot of the things they worried about came true and have worsened the quality of life and safety of tens of millions of people in this country. Shit's real.
Except Trump blatantly lies daily while journalists from major news sources tend to be accurate and only rarely need significant retractions/corrections. They have bias in what they choose to report and which details they focus on, but they rarely outright lie like Trump does. They're playing different games.
Gross. And very worrisome. When avoiding cable and using an ad blocker, it's easy to lose track of how immense this problem is.
You're right that greed/manipulation is the bigger issue, but they're both real threats. Trump, trolls, and Russia's propaganda campaigns directly harassing people (especially to extreme degrees) hurts peoples' hope/respect for humanity and erodes their trust in fellow humans which leads to more people cheating to get ahead instead of being considerate toward their neighbors. Exaggerated negative comments lead people to assume the worst and polarize people against their fellow citizens and create more extremists on both sides. I see that as a real threat.
(Extremism from all sides is a major problem too, but at least that's sincere instead of purely meant to pit people against each other)
Good news! You are mistaken in thinking that the forms at the DMV are the same for everyone. Non-citizens file forms that do not come with automatic voter registration, and they are not able to register to vote with the non-citizen versions of those IDs. However, this may only be true for California (the state we were talking about). Perhaps it sometimes happens in other states like you suggested.
"While it’s true that undocumented residents living in California can obtain driver’s licenses, the state has not passed any laws that also provide them the right to vote. The New Motor Voter Act was passed in an effort to improve voter turnout, and while this law does automatically register citizens to vote when they obtain or renew their driver’s licenses, that action only applies to citizens who have already attested and/or documented an eligibility to vote."
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch...
And for the San Francisco school board elections, it sounds like you may be assuming that non-citizens will get a general ballot for state/federal elections instead of a ballot specific to the school board elections. Can't vote for something like congressperson or president if those aren't even fields on the ballot.
I don't see an option to mandate receiving only "private" payments and to block "public" payments, but I was able to set payments I send to "private" by default in the privacy settings, and that change made the service somewhat less annoying.
I wish that "private" would be the default payment setting upon first installing the app, but then they would lose what sets them apart from similar services.