The reason the flu is so scary is because it could mutate into something that kills 70% of the time. And that's just as likely (or moreso) than ebola mutating into something that's airborne. See how easy it is to use that logic both ways?
Anything that might kill us has two parts: 1. Chance of it happening to us. 2. Chance of it killing us if it happens.
Our powerful pre-frontal cortex should multiply the two, and realize that something with a 0.0001% chance of happening and a 70% chance of killing us is no more or less life-threatening than something with a 70% chance of happening and a 0.0001% chance of killing us. But our primitive hunter-gatherer brains increase our fear of rare but occasional events, and downplay our fear of regular events, so we distort that curve.
To pull a few more statistics out of my ass, I bet there are many people who demand the government do everything they can (including suppressing civil liberties like freedom of travel) to protect citizens from ebola, while they simultaneously hate and condemn the government for its efforts to restrict smoking. And I bet more of those people will die (at an otherwise young and healthy age) from smoking than ebola.
>> If they work so much now so they don't have time to find someone, is this really the solution to the correct problem?
Why do you presume they haven't yet "found the right man"? Maybe they just don't want to have kids yet, but realize that it's far better/cheaper/safer to extract eggs at 24 instead of 38?
Licking was a comical exaggeration. But curtains are sufficient to separate adult patients and prevent cross contamination, no "separate rooms" necessary. Families with children are a bigger concern but ultimately the safest and most practical course is to keep those kids with their parents, and keep them all at home.
Humans instinctually fear rare events significantly more than common events, even if those common events are more likely to result in danger. It made sense as a hunter-gatherer to run from the rare and strange, but today the instinct is often just lower brain messing with our more-advanced rational thought processes. It's why the average person fears plane crashes far more than car crashes, despite car crashes being statistically a more likely way to die.
Things that might kill you have two parts - the chance of this affecting you, and the chance of the affect being death. People inflate the first for rare events, and downplay it for common events, despite science and statistics to the contrary.
Limited liability is a privilege, not a right. Think of anything else corporations today demand - including their new so-called "free speech" - and realize that all of those things can be negotiated away to those voluntarily seeking this limited liability.
A corporation enjoys special tax and legal status not available to individuals. In exchange for that status, the government can and should demand that they give up their so-called "right" to free speech (the same way non-profit groups can be restricted so long as they wish to retain their non-profit status).
The law should also be changed to make it easier to pierce the corporate veil and prosecute executives, employees, and board members. The defense of "I didn't know what the other guys were doing so I couldn't see the whole picture" should be evidence of conspiracy, not a defense.
Punishment for corporations found guilty of crimes should be more than token fines. Yes, non-employee shareholders of publicly-traded companies enjoy limited liability for those companies' actions, but they do have liability up to the value of the stock. No, it doesn't make sense to give corporations the "death penalty" very often, so long as the company had some legal business, but the government should be better able to seize assets, primarily stock and options, especially from executives. The public will demand more accountability from the companies they own if they know that corporate crime will more often cost them their ownership directly, not just as a blip in profit.
Because government in this country is so limited and the benefits of monopoly (or, more likely duopoly) so immense, corporates naturally grow in size until they are "too big to fail". Again, as with free speech in exchange for special tax status, corporations do not have the right to grow so big or become so vital to the economy that their collapse would lead to destabilization of the country. The government should regularly be reviewing this and taking actions to break those companies up, or prevent the mergers that lead to this situation in the first place. Maximizing efficiency and profits through consolidation when times are good leads to increased instability when times are bad. It is the government's job to regulate the economy to ensure the general welfare, and that includes smoothing both the highs and lows.
While I am not a medical professional, someone out there could argue that a drug designed to prevent more of your healthy X cells from being infected is a vaccine, even if some of your existing X cells are already infected. Substitute white blood, red blood, brain, heart, bone, etc. for X depending on the disease.
Humans are not homogenous and not every cell of an infected person is infected. While such a drug should probably be called both a treatment and a vaccine, language evolves and if people start calling drugs that prevent any or further infection "vaccines", so be it.
It's not like it's that hard to use past sales to predict relevant purchases; most advertisers are just too oblivious/stupid to figure this out. You might want to order a case of oil or some wax or maybe new insurance, right?
Or, if I liked those boots or whatever - I already bought them. I don't need another pair!
Relevant contextual ads are those that appear before I've settled on or rejected the product in question. They are also for the same type of products. If I buy no-grain dog food or dandruff shampoo, for example, don't try to sell me the regular shit. Finally, give me a reason to click on the ad instead of buying from a usual source. I already pay Amazon for "free" shipping - you need to match that and beat their price for me to bother creating a new account somewhere else. Honestly even if I do want the thing you advertise, I'll probably go to Amazon or the local store and buy my regular brand there anyway (thanks for the reminder).
To be effective, advertisers need to be better able to anticipate needs. This works pretty well some places - at Target, for example, where they use your information to determine if you are having a baby and then send you ads and coupons for things the child will need just before you need them. This is more difficult to track for adults. For the boot example, you'd need to remember that I looked at boots, then advertise boots to me again in ~10 years just as the old pair wears out.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do. Someone mentions sex, and you think they mean having babies? WTF? I think we solved that baby making problem part of sex quite a long time ago.
When someone mentions procreative the GP thinks they mean having babies. Since, you know, that's what that means. =p
No kidding about international travel. After being so afraid of overages that I left my phone at home from a trip to Europe in 2008, earlier this year I took a work trip to South Korea / Taiwan / Hong Kong / mainland China. As I got off each plane and turned my phone on, the immediate text with "welcome to [country] standard data rates apply" was pretty awesome. I didn't take my laptop - I used my phone exclusively for two weeks.
(Verizon iPhone with a T-Mobile SIM, so yes I could get data in S. Korea despite the country being CDMA iirc.)
Saying that something is more lethal doesn't mean the same as saying it kills more people.
Who are you to say which is more lethal? It seems to me that H1N1's better transmission methods make it the more effective, if less efficient, killer than Ebola. So far H1N1 has thus proven itself to be more lethal, though of course Ebola might catch up.
Lethal - "sufficient to cause death" or "capable of causing death" is a word with enough ambiguity in the definition to apply to either case. It does not exclusively mean "efficient at causing death once afflicted on someone" as you imply.
So that's just 16 half-liter donations, which spaced out every 8 weeks takes less than 2.5 years. There's plenty of time for Dad to donate that much between when he learns his wife is pregnant and when that kid needs to enter high school. (Plenty more if Mom donates, too.)
The big problem, as in everywhere else, is that paying for blood attracts donors with bad blood (literally), some of which will escape testing and get into the supply. "Thanks to the blood for grades program, China now has enough blood for your transfusion. Unfortunately, the blood you got had untraceable levels of HIV and now you'll get sick and die, but you can do so knowing that some unrelated kid got into a better high school for your suffering."
That's not to say the U.S. doesn't have some of the same problems. The incentive to give can be strong.
I'm not a tax (or any other sort of) attorney, but I would think that, once the original poster's employer has paid his conference fees, they will expect (require) him to travel to and attend the conference, even if he's paying for the travel himself.
Generally, travel to and from required work-related tasks that are not at your normal job site is tax deductible. So, yes, to the OP, buy your own tickets to Vegas, stay a few extra days after the conference and enjoy a vacation, and (after consulting with an accountant or tax attorney) deduct the cost of the airfare plus the hotel costs (during the conference) from your taxes. And of course travel days and days spent at the conference are work days, not vacation days. Maybe you can negotiate with your employer to also provide per diem?
My Kickstarter edition of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was $49. Since it arrived just after we had a baby, I resold it at a flea market, new in shrink, for $140.
I followed Fisker for years of development, primarily because they had a four-seat convertible on their roadmap, the Karma Sunset. Tesla hasn't managed one of those yet.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason the flu is so scary is because it could mutate into something that kills 70% of the time. And that's just as likely (or moreso) than ebola mutating into something that's airborne. See how easy it is to use that logic both ways?
Anything that might kill us has two parts:
1. Chance of it happening to us.
2. Chance of it killing us if it happens.
Our powerful pre-frontal cortex should multiply the two, and realize that something with a 0.0001% chance of happening and a 70% chance of killing us is no more or less life-threatening than something with a 70% chance of happening and a 0.0001% chance of killing us. But our primitive hunter-gatherer brains increase our fear of rare but occasional events, and downplay our fear of regular events, so we distort that curve.
To pull a few more statistics out of my ass, I bet there are many people who demand the government do everything they can (including suppressing civil liberties like freedom of travel) to protect citizens from ebola, while they simultaneously hate and condemn the government for its efforts to restrict smoking. And I bet more of those people will die (at an otherwise young and healthy age) from smoking than ebola.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jv...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jv...
>> If they work so much now so they don't have time to find someone, is this really the solution to the correct problem?
Why do you presume they haven't yet "found the right man"? Maybe they just don't want to have kids yet, but realize that it's far better/cheaper/safer to extract eggs at 24 instead of 38?
That's a question you would need to ask each individual woman. And respect each answer either way.
No kidding. Those burning fuels will kill more animals in the long run than the .... zero animals likely hurt by Google.
See my reply to the other poster.
Licking was a comical exaggeration. But curtains are sufficient to separate adult patients and prevent cross contamination, no "separate rooms" necessary. Families with children are a bigger concern but ultimately the safest and most practical course is to keep those kids with their parents, and keep them all at home.
Humans instinctually fear rare events significantly more than common events, even if those common events are more likely to result in danger. It made sense as a hunter-gatherer to run from the rare and strange, but today the instinct is often just lower brain messing with our more-advanced rational thought processes. It's why the average person fears plane crashes far more than car crashes, despite car crashes being statistically a more likely way to die.
Things that might kill you have two parts - the chance of this affecting you, and the chance of the affect being death. People inflate the first for rare events, and downplay it for common events, despite science and statistics to the contrary.
>> Put them all in the same room? Maybe only one or two have ebola. Can't put them in one room, then they'll all get ebola if a few had it.
Not unless they lick each other's bodily fluids.
Limited liability is a privilege, not a right. Think of anything else corporations today demand - including their new so-called "free speech" - and realize that all of those things can be negotiated away to those voluntarily seeking this limited liability.
A corporation enjoys special tax and legal status not available to individuals. In exchange for that status, the government can and should demand that they give up their so-called "right" to free speech (the same way non-profit groups can be restricted so long as they wish to retain their non-profit status).
The law should also be changed to make it easier to pierce the corporate veil and prosecute executives, employees, and board members. The defense of "I didn't know what the other guys were doing so I couldn't see the whole picture" should be evidence of conspiracy, not a defense.
Punishment for corporations found guilty of crimes should be more than token fines. Yes, non-employee shareholders of publicly-traded companies enjoy limited liability for those companies' actions, but they do have liability up to the value of the stock. No, it doesn't make sense to give corporations the "death penalty" very often, so long as the company had some legal business, but the government should be better able to seize assets, primarily stock and options, especially from executives. The public will demand more accountability from the companies they own if they know that corporate crime will more often cost them their ownership directly, not just as a blip in profit.
Because government in this country is so limited and the benefits of monopoly (or, more likely duopoly) so immense, corporates naturally grow in size until they are "too big to fail". Again, as with free speech in exchange for special tax status, corporations do not have the right to grow so big or become so vital to the economy that their collapse would lead to destabilization of the country. The government should regularly be reviewing this and taking actions to break those companies up, or prevent the mergers that lead to this situation in the first place. Maximizing efficiency and profits through consolidation when times are good leads to increased instability when times are bad. It is the government's job to regulate the economy to ensure the general welfare, and that includes smoothing both the highs and lows.
While I am not a medical professional, someone out there could argue that a drug designed to prevent more of your healthy X cells from being infected is a vaccine, even if some of your existing X cells are already infected. Substitute white blood, red blood, brain, heart, bone, etc. for X depending on the disease.
Humans are not homogenous and not every cell of an infected person is infected. While such a drug should probably be called both a treatment and a vaccine, language evolves and if people start calling drugs that prevent any or further infection "vaccines", so be it.
But explain to us how limiting airline flights from there to here will spread Ebola more rapidly in Africa.
Because if you want to get home, now you need to trek through the jungle to another country first, then lie about having been in an Ebola country.
It's not like it's that hard to use past sales to predict relevant purchases; most advertisers are just too oblivious/stupid to figure this out. You might want to order a case of oil or some wax or maybe new insurance, right?
Or, if I liked those boots or whatever - I already bought them. I don't need another pair!
Relevant contextual ads are those that appear before I've settled on or rejected the product in question. They are also for the same type of products. If I buy no-grain dog food or dandruff shampoo, for example, don't try to sell me the regular shit. Finally, give me a reason to click on the ad instead of buying from a usual source. I already pay Amazon for "free" shipping - you need to match that and beat their price for me to bother creating a new account somewhere else. Honestly even if I do want the thing you advertise, I'll probably go to Amazon or the local store and buy my regular brand there anyway (thanks for the reminder).
To be effective, advertisers need to be better able to anticipate needs. This works pretty well some places - at Target, for example, where they use your information to determine if you are having a baby and then send you ads and coupons for things the child will need just before you need them. This is more difficult to track for adults. For the boot example, you'd need to remember that I looked at boots, then advertise boots to me again in ~10 years just as the old pair wears out.
Having procreative sex is one of the most carbon expensive things we can do.
Someone mentions sex, and you think they mean having babies? WTF? I think we solved that baby making problem part of sex quite a long time ago.
When someone mentions procreative the GP thinks they mean having babies. Since, you know, that's what that means. =p
No kidding about international travel. After being so afraid of overages that I left my phone at home from a trip to Europe in 2008, earlier this year I took a work trip to South Korea / Taiwan / Hong Kong / mainland China. As I got off each plane and turned my phone on, the immediate text with "welcome to [country] standard data rates apply" was pretty awesome. I didn't take my laptop - I used my phone exclusively for two weeks.
(Verizon iPhone with a T-Mobile SIM, so yes I could get data in S. Korea despite the country being CDMA iirc.)
Saying that something is more lethal doesn't mean the same as saying it kills more people.
Who are you to say which is more lethal? It seems to me that H1N1's better transmission methods make it the more effective, if less efficient, killer than Ebola. So far H1N1 has thus proven itself to be more lethal, though of course Ebola might catch up.
Lethal - "sufficient to cause death" or "capable of causing death" is a word with enough ambiguity in the definition to apply to either case. It does not exclusively mean "efficient at causing death once afflicted on someone" as you imply.
So that's just 16 half-liter donations, which spaced out every 8 weeks takes less than 2.5 years. There's plenty of time for Dad to donate that much between when he learns his wife is pregnant and when that kid needs to enter high school. (Plenty more if Mom donates, too.)
The big problem, as in everywhere else, is that paying for blood attracts donors with bad blood (literally), some of which will escape testing and get into the supply. "Thanks to the blood for grades program, China now has enough blood for your transfusion. Unfortunately, the blood you got had untraceable levels of HIV and now you'll get sick and die, but you can do so knowing that some unrelated kid got into a better high school for your suffering."
That's not to say the U.S. doesn't have some of the same problems. The incentive to give can be strong.
I'm not a tax (or any other sort of) attorney, but I would think that, once the original poster's employer has paid his conference fees, they will expect (require) him to travel to and attend the conference, even if he's paying for the travel himself.
Generally, travel to and from required work-related tasks that are not at your normal job site is tax deductible. So, yes, to the OP, buy your own tickets to Vegas, stay a few extra days after the conference and enjoy a vacation, and (after consulting with an accountant or tax attorney) deduct the cost of the airfare plus the hotel costs (during the conference) from your taxes. And of course travel days and days spent at the conference are work days, not vacation days. Maybe you can negotiate with your employer to also provide per diem?
My Kickstarter edition of Euphoria: Build a Better Dystopia was $49. Since it arrived just after we had a baby, I resold it at a flea market, new in shrink, for $140.
So no good idea ever has been ignored by capitalists (banks, VCs, businesses)?
No bank would loan against money that would be returned to the backers, not the bank, were the project to fail.
I followed Fisker for years of development, primarily because they had a four-seat convertible on their roadmap, the Karma Sunset. Tesla hasn't managed one of those yet.