Excuse me, could you please more clearly explain which side you favor for each of those issues so that I can mod you up or down as appropriate, and post 3 paragraphs of spam?:)
Why is it then that there has been little progress in the last 15 years on any of the issues you raise?
Both parties "make a priority" out of the items that tend to trigger voter loyalty, but neither party actually achieves much. They both profit a great deal from the status quo. To pick just one example of such an issue, the last thing the Republicans want to do is ban abortion completely, and the last thing the Democrats want to do is make it completely ubiquitous - then nobody would have any reason to donate.
To vote for the mainstream candidates either party nominates is to just perpetuate the problem. There are a few rare examples of candidates worth voting for, but you'll never see them nominated by their parties for POTUS/etc.
Actually, I wouldn't punish the companies at all, unless it were clear that major shareholders were behind it.
Instead I'd punish the executives and board members associated with the crime.
Corporate liability for crime almost never makes sense. That means that the people making the decisions collect bonuses, and the shareholders are punished. They don't even punish the shareholders at the time the decision was made, but instead the shareholders 10 years later or whatever. Talk about no incentive to change.
Ok, slight correction - 12 bits per channel, and I believe this camera records 3 channels per pixel (though it might be 4 - I'd have to look it up). So, that's 36-48 bits.
JPEG gets you only 8 bits per channel, so anything better than a point-and-shoot in terms of dynamic range needs to use RAW, or some other file format.
Yup, I'm not a big fan of blaming pilots. They're rarely the root cause per-se. They might be an immediate cause, but usually there is a deeper issue, like lack of training, or not enough sleep, or whatever. If you don't change the oil in the engine for two years and the engine fails, do you blame it on the engine? Sure, you can point it out as an immediate problem, but the cause is poor maintenance, and there might be an underlying cause for that.
People are just really complicated machines. If you don't operate them correctly, they fail more often. If you do operate them correctly, they still fail like any other machine.
A big problem is that CFLs and such cost a lot more, and there is no way to ascertain quality from looking at the package. Maybe if they were all independently tested that would help, but they all have the same warranty, and they all make the same lifetime claims, and if they don't live as long as claimed your recourse is generally nil.
So, should I buy the $6 box of bulbs, or the $8 one? Impossible to tell whether I'm paying for quality, or just for the name on the box.
I will NEVER understand why these corporations like Apple/Toyota think they can offer a warranty, and then not honor said warranty. Maybe they believe the customers will not bother seeking legal recompense.
You answered your own question - most of the time they don't. Now, when you're talking about $6k engine replacements I'm not surprised at all that lawsuits happened - that is a lot of money and car owners going through that are going to be pretty ticked.
Apple's products are much cheaper and they might have gotten away with it if they weren't Apple. Something like this was bound to get the attention of the press, which means class action lawsuits, which means lawyers willing to take this on contingency.
The bottom line is that companies can get away with anti-consumer behavior as long as they don't leave the smell of blood in the water. When they really push their luck then the lawyers start circling and there is a feeding frenzy. Cases are decided by juries and if it gets that far the company that promises the best warranty in the industry and refuses to honor it is going to get hosed.
Unless the people creating the tests are fifth graders, there is no reason that we can't make sure the tests are accurate.
Otherwise we're just testing the ability of kids to regurgitate incorrect information. If one happens to know the correct principle then they have to remember not to apply it. Do we really want to punish kids who watch PBS? I think my first introductions to relativity were sometime before 7th grade from watching a documentary my father had recorded. While my understanding was certainly weak, I did appreciate that the passage of time varied with relative velocity and gravitational fields.
Do we really want to be punishing our most potentially promising students, rather than encouraging them?
Laws regarding credit cards no doubt vary considerably internationally. In the US they're shockingly consumer-friendly. The burden of proof is basically on the merchant to demonstrate that the charge is legitimate. Until the dispute is resolved the charge has to be removed, you don't have to pay it, and you can't be charged interest on it either.
Yup, and the Chrome browser is practically an OS at the rate it is going. 80% of the source code is stuff that is probably already on your hard drive if you use linux, but which will now be loaded a second time in RAM because Google doesn't believe in dynamic linking...
Truth is truth. It is exactly the edge cases where you learn anything in science and especially in mathematics. Planets travel in elipses, as long as there is no such thing as relativity. If asked true or false, planets travel in elipses, you'd have to answer false. Of course, true elipses don't even work in Newtonian physics unless there are only two bodies in the universe.
Yup, and don't forget some means of scaling the building. If you can use a stairwell to scale it in the "correct" answer you could use it to do it the "wrong" way too.
I suspect the shadow method is likely to be more accurate than using a barometer to measure pressure anyway. It requires a great deal of care, but the error is likely to be pretty small as long as the barometer is reasonably long. If it is some tiny round aneroid barometer then that might be an issue.
And all of the above is why I'll never subject myself to "education" again if I can possibly avoid it.
I loved taking classes and learning. For the most part I didn't even mind the tests. However, once in a while you get the wrong professor and it creates nothing but headaches if you're like me. Whether that means:
1. Doing stuff because you have to, not because it is useful. 2. Having to regurgitate the appropriate incorrect answer on demand. 3. Having to avoid correcting the teacher. 4. Acknowledging the fact that you are taking the course to get it on your transcript, not to learn something. 5. Realizing that you're paying thousands of dollars to accomplish what could be gained from listening to some CDs, reading some books, and having a few conversations.
I love learning. I love learning in classrooms. However, much of what happens in formal education programs has nothing to do with education.
Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
Uh, would love to see what "definition" you're using here. Chopping up neurons and figuring out how they work is science. Understanding the behavior of algorithms is often considered a "science" (though arguably computer science is really a branch of math). Working out the fact that lions eat zebras and not the other way around is science.
I'm not sure how understanding all of that is science, but understanding other emergent behaviors of particles in a brain are not. Thought and emotion are nothing more than organized movement of action potentials in the brain.
As long as the book doesn't contain the Megacorp's logo/trademark unless it was made by them, I agree.
Now, if it includes their logo, but wasn't actually made by them, then I do have concerns that consumers be aware of what they're getting. Now, if it is made clear that these are cheap knock-offs that may not be of the same quality, then caveat emptor applies.
If these are just books made by the manufacturer but sold at 1/10th the price, ship away. I see no reason why vendors should be able to control their distribution channels - if you can get your hands on the product you should be able to sell it. I'd make an exception for thinks like food and drugs, where anybody selling it should probably be licensed and ensure their supply chain controls storage/etc - purely for public safety. I don't want a vial of insulin that has been sitting in a hot warehouse for a month.
Yes, if only we could engineer human behavior to act only within strict tolerances, removing individual choice and freedom in the process...That sounds like Freedom (TM)
So, true freedom is letting people for tribes and pillage each other. Let the best warlord win. You have the freedom to defend yourself, if you're able to.
Most people are willing to give up the freedom to rape their neighbor in exchange for the security to be able to sleep at night without maintaining an armed watch. Or rather, they are maintaining an armed watch, but we all pitch in to make a police department.
So, once you accept this you're accepting social engineering - using designed processes and infrastructure to keep random individual behavior in line. After that, it is all a slippery slope to full-scale eugenics and mind control.
Arguably your paradise of true freedom still exists today. If you want to grab a baseball bat and start clubbing people, nothing is preventing you from doing so. If you're good enough at it, nobody will be able to stop you. However, the most likely outcome in a modern society isn't all that different than what would have happened to a cave man - sooner or later you'll run into a bunch of people who are better armed or organized, and that will be it.
Unless your xbox can only play this show at the time it is playing live on TV, or during other scheduled timeslots, multicast won't help you at all. To use multicast you need many clients that are all looking to download the same data at the same time. Especially for something realtime like video it is of somewhat limited value. If you're downloading blobs for non-interactive use it is more useful since you could just repeat the transmission and clients would register for whatever parts they still need (multicast would actually work well for bittorrent/etc).
I think GPS existed for civilian use, although selective availability was in place, so its accuracy was very borderline for most purposes. Forget turn-by-turn navigation.
All that tech might have been possible, but it would be built into something the size of a briefcase (another popular item in that day). It would likely plug in to be used, like most cell phones of that era (maybe 12V in a car).
Any maps would have to be read off of CD-ROM, likely in a caddy like most drives of that era. The maps would be rendered on-screen in beautiful EGA, or maybe cutting-edge VGA at a whopping 320x200x8.
It would have been about as successful as the Newton, which itself would have been space-age tech at that time.
Depends on your definition of expert. If you define it as competence, chances are only another expert could determine whether he had it, and the court could not do so. If you define it as a big CV, as most courts do, then expertise generally represents your ability to pay for degrees/etc, and has nothing to do with your competence per-se.
And that explains quite a few court rulings over the years...
The truth, of course, has nothing to do with the ability of any individual or the court to recognize it.
Hate to double-reply, but I was reflecting on this further and since you seemed to be at least reasonably well versed in math I wanted to share my thoughts, which you might find useful.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument again that at the present overall vaccination rate the rational decision is to not vaccinate. Let's suppose that the ideal rate is 80% (an arbitrary value - s/80/x if you prefer).
If the rate is above 80% rational actors will choose not to vaccinate. If the rate is below 80% rational actors will choose to vaccinate. However, this isn't exactly true, since the rational actors probably don't base things off the vaccination rate itself, but rather on overall prevalence of the disease, which is of course a function of vaccination rate.
So, now we have defined a function that is self-correcting - an oscillator. If the output is above 80 it will have a downward force applied, and if it is below 80 it will have an upward force applied. A self-correcting function is dampened, and lots of interesting things can happen with dampened systems.
However, that corrective force is a function at best of overall vaccination rates, and at worst a function of disease infection rates. The former is probably reported to the public with a year or two lag, and the latter has a much longer delay since you need people to walk around, get sick, spread the disease, and then for the CDC or whatever to pick up on it and for figures to become accepted - perhaps 5-10 years could easily pass before the vaccination rate impacts published infection figures.
Any changes in the corrective force will therefore have a significant multi-year delay applied to them. Now let's talk about the corrective force.
People tend to over-react to news of health issues - just look at current vaccination trends as a result of Wakefield/etc. People will tend to not wait until science is established, but will rather take knee-jerk reactions. If there was a lot of evidence that DPT was net-harmful the vaccination rate wouldn't drop from 90 to 80, but probably from 90 to 30 or something like that.
So, what happens when you have a dampened function where the corrective action is large, and the delay in applying that correction is large? You get an overdampened system. Such a system will tend to oscillate wildly, and will spend very little time in the optimal range. If vaccine rates are low epidemics will break out, and everybody will get vaccinated bringing rates to 100%. Then after a decade of that the disease is nearly eradicated and pundits will talk about how the vaccine is more trouble than it is worth and rates will drop close to 0% until a substantial portion of the population is vulnerable, and then suddenly we'll have epidemics again.
So, even if you wanted to keep the overall rate near 80%, allowing individual decisions on the basis of your argument is not a way to accomplish this. If any engineer ran into a system that behaved as described they'd, well, engineer it better. That would involve replacing the control mechanism with one that worked better, either a complicated one that keeps rates near 80 (roll the dice and vaccinate accordingly, and punish doctors who deviate too far from the norm?), or a simple one that just pegs the rate at 100% since the outcome at 100% is way better than the outcome at 0%.
Again, I'm not convinced the odds really are as you suggest, but the fact is that individual actors making individual rational decisions in a situation like this can lead to very bad behavior, not unlike what is seen in dysfunctional stock markets and such.
Well, the parent mixed up two cases I think, because the end-run was actually done by MS.
However, let's ignore than and suppose that it was Apple. Nobody is questioning that the German court is able to enforce its injunctions, but only that such enforcement is likely to have little practical effect on the company it is issued against. The most the German court can do is block all imports of Apple products, and seize all Apple assets they have control over. Then all the US court has to do is have Motorola reimburse Apple for those losses in the US, and since both companies have more assets in the US than in Germany, in the end Apple comes out ahead despite losing the case in Germany.
This isn't unlike Slashdot geeks getting worked up about the RIAA and declaring that they're going to boycott any music purchases. The RIAA just yawns at the resulting 0.01% loss and keeps collecting their 99 cents/track while suing the parents of teenagers.
Now, again, the US case didn't involve Apple, so none of the above is actually going to happen. It is probably worth noting that inside the German market the actions of the German court certainly will have quite visible effects regardless.
Well, the problem here is the same problem that leads so many businesses to build warehouses full of cubicles when for a far lesser investment people could be just as effective working from home. Bosses like to survey their empires, and being able to hand out offices as perks makes them feel important. Even today in most offices looking busy matters more than being productive, and looking busy usually means putting out lots of fires. Effective and productive employees are usually given more work until they're no longer effective and productive. And so on...
And as a greater percentage of people opt out of vaccination, the potential harm due to not vaccination climbs, shifting the cost-benefit. Which means that somewhere, we'll hit a balance--not at 0% vaccination nor at 100% vaccination. It's not an all-or-nothing thing.
Ok, suppose the best cost-benefit is at 80% vaccination (again, for the sake of argument). How do you propose to achieve this?
By your math you'll always be better off as an individual not getting vaccinated. So, if you leave it up to individuals and let these facts be known, then you'll end up with a 0% vaccination rate, which by your own admission is not adequate.
The only way to end up with an 80% rate in a situation where individual decisions are rationally against vaccination is to mandate that doctors roll a d100 or something and vaccinate on a roll of 80 or below. Good luck getting that made policy. The only real way to achieve an 80% vaccination rate if your math is right is to mandate 100% coverage.
And this is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons.
Now, I'm not convinced that your math is right, but I'm conceding that for the sake of argument. Back in the 1930s they certainly didn't have any trouble getting people to take the vaccine, and it was no more effective or safe back then. Whooping cough, even for adults, isn't exactly a trivial problem.
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Excuse me, could you please more clearly explain which side you favor for each of those issues so that I can mod you up or down as appropriate, and post 3 paragraphs of spam? :)
Why is it then that there has been little progress in the last 15 years on any of the issues you raise?
Both parties "make a priority" out of the items that tend to trigger voter loyalty, but neither party actually achieves much. They both profit a great deal from the status quo. To pick just one example of such an issue, the last thing the Republicans want to do is ban abortion completely, and the last thing the Democrats want to do is make it completely ubiquitous - then nobody would have any reason to donate.
To vote for the mainstream candidates either party nominates is to just perpetuate the problem. There are a few rare examples of candidates worth voting for, but you'll never see them nominated by their parties for POTUS/etc.
Actually, I wouldn't punish the companies at all, unless it were clear that major shareholders were behind it.
Instead I'd punish the executives and board members associated with the crime.
Corporate liability for crime almost never makes sense. That means that the people making the decisions collect bonuses, and the shareholders are punished. They don't even punish the shareholders at the time the decision was made, but instead the shareholders 10 years later or whatever. Talk about no incentive to change.
I'm surprised he doesn't just leave the mother ship out at anchor and fly a helicopter to shore.
Ok, slight correction - 12 bits per channel, and I believe this camera records 3 channels per pixel (though it might be 4 - I'd have to look it up). So, that's 36-48 bits.
JPEG gets you only 8 bits per channel, so anything better than a point-and-shoot in terms of dynamic range needs to use RAW, or some other file format.
I've got a fairly inexpensive camera with with 12-bpp sensitivity, which means that I'm losing range if I edit it in Gimp.
Sure, I can use other tools, and that is what I do if I need the dynamic range. I'd love to be able to use Gimp, and prefer FOSS.
Yup, I'm not a big fan of blaming pilots. They're rarely the root cause per-se. They might be an immediate cause, but usually there is a deeper issue, like lack of training, or not enough sleep, or whatever. If you don't change the oil in the engine for two years and the engine fails, do you blame it on the engine? Sure, you can point it out as an immediate problem, but the cause is poor maintenance, and there might be an underlying cause for that.
People are just really complicated machines. If you don't operate them correctly, they fail more often. If you do operate them correctly, they still fail like any other machine.
A big problem is that CFLs and such cost a lot more, and there is no way to ascertain quality from looking at the package. Maybe if they were all independently tested that would help, but they all have the same warranty, and they all make the same lifetime claims, and if they don't live as long as claimed your recourse is generally nil.
So, should I buy the $6 box of bulbs, or the $8 one? Impossible to tell whether I'm paying for quality, or just for the name on the box.
I will NEVER understand why these corporations like Apple/Toyota think they can offer a warranty, and then not honor said warranty. Maybe they believe the customers will not bother seeking legal recompense.
You answered your own question - most of the time they don't. Now, when you're talking about $6k engine replacements I'm not surprised at all that lawsuits happened - that is a lot of money and car owners going through that are going to be pretty ticked.
Apple's products are much cheaper and they might have gotten away with it if they weren't Apple. Something like this was bound to get the attention of the press, which means class action lawsuits, which means lawyers willing to take this on contingency.
The bottom line is that companies can get away with anti-consumer behavior as long as they don't leave the smell of blood in the water. When they really push their luck then the lawyers start circling and there is a feeding frenzy. Cases are decided by juries and if it gets that far the company that promises the best warranty in the industry and refuses to honor it is going to get hosed.
Unless the people creating the tests are fifth graders, there is no reason that we can't make sure the tests are accurate.
Otherwise we're just testing the ability of kids to regurgitate incorrect information. If one happens to know the correct principle then they have to remember not to apply it. Do we really want to punish kids who watch PBS? I think my first introductions to relativity were sometime before 7th grade from watching a documentary my father had recorded. While my understanding was certainly weak, I did appreciate that the passage of time varied with relative velocity and gravitational fields.
Do we really want to be punishing our most potentially promising students, rather than encouraging them?
I assume you're Canadian?
Laws regarding credit cards no doubt vary considerably internationally. In the US they're shockingly consumer-friendly. The burden of proof is basically on the merchant to demonstrate that the charge is legitimate. Until the dispute is resolved the charge has to be removed, you don't have to pay it, and you can't be charged interest on it either.
Yup, and the Chrome browser is practically an OS at the rate it is going. 80% of the source code is stuff that is probably already on your hard drive if you use linux, but which will now be loaded a second time in RAM because Google doesn't believe in dynamic linking...
Truth is truth. It is exactly the edge cases where you learn anything in science and especially in mathematics. Planets travel in elipses, as long as there is no such thing as relativity. If asked true or false, planets travel in elipses, you'd have to answer false. Of course, true elipses don't even work in Newtonian physics unless there are only two bodies in the universe.
Yup, and don't forget some means of scaling the building. If you can use a stairwell to scale it in the "correct" answer you could use it to do it the "wrong" way too.
I suspect the shadow method is likely to be more accurate than using a barometer to measure pressure anyway. It requires a great deal of care, but the error is likely to be pretty small as long as the barometer is reasonably long. If it is some tiny round aneroid barometer then that might be an issue.
And all of the above is why I'll never subject myself to "education" again if I can possibly avoid it.
I loved taking classes and learning. For the most part I didn't even mind the tests. However, once in a while you get the wrong professor and it creates nothing but headaches if you're like me. Whether that means:
1. Doing stuff because you have to, not because it is useful.
2. Having to regurgitate the appropriate incorrect answer on demand.
3. Having to avoid correcting the teacher.
4. Acknowledging the fact that you are taking the course to get it on your transcript, not to learn something.
5. Realizing that you're paying thousands of dollars to accomplish what could be gained from listening to some CDs, reading some books, and having a few conversations.
I love learning. I love learning in classrooms. However, much of what happens in formal education programs has nothing to do with education.
Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.
Uh, would love to see what "definition" you're using here. Chopping up neurons and figuring out how they work is science. Understanding the behavior of algorithms is often considered a "science" (though arguably computer science is really a branch of math). Working out the fact that lions eat zebras and not the other way around is science.
I'm not sure how understanding all of that is science, but understanding other emergent behaviors of particles in a brain are not. Thought and emotion are nothing more than organized movement of action potentials in the brain.
As long as the book doesn't contain the Megacorp's logo/trademark unless it was made by them, I agree.
Now, if it includes their logo, but wasn't actually made by them, then I do have concerns that consumers be aware of what they're getting. Now, if it is made clear that these are cheap knock-offs that may not be of the same quality, then caveat emptor applies.
If these are just books made by the manufacturer but sold at 1/10th the price, ship away. I see no reason why vendors should be able to control their distribution channels - if you can get your hands on the product you should be able to sell it. I'd make an exception for thinks like food and drugs, where anybody selling it should probably be licensed and ensure their supply chain controls storage/etc - purely for public safety. I don't want a vial of insulin that has been sitting in a hot warehouse for a month.
Yes, if only we could engineer human behavior to act only within strict tolerances, removing individual choice and freedom in the process...That sounds like Freedom (TM)
So, true freedom is letting people for tribes and pillage each other. Let the best warlord win. You have the freedom to defend yourself, if you're able to.
Most people are willing to give up the freedom to rape their neighbor in exchange for the security to be able to sleep at night without maintaining an armed watch. Or rather, they are maintaining an armed watch, but we all pitch in to make a police department.
So, once you accept this you're accepting social engineering - using designed processes and infrastructure to keep random individual behavior in line. After that, it is all a slippery slope to full-scale eugenics and mind control.
Arguably your paradise of true freedom still exists today. If you want to grab a baseball bat and start clubbing people, nothing is preventing you from doing so. If you're good enough at it, nobody will be able to stop you. However, the most likely outcome in a modern society isn't all that different than what would have happened to a cave man - sooner or later you'll run into a bunch of people who are better armed or organized, and that will be it.
Unless your xbox can only play this show at the time it is playing live on TV, or during other scheduled timeslots, multicast won't help you at all. To use multicast you need many clients that are all looking to download the same data at the same time. Especially for something realtime like video it is of somewhat limited value. If you're downloading blobs for non-interactive use it is more useful since you could just repeat the transmission and clients would register for whatever parts they still need (multicast would actually work well for bittorrent/etc).
I think GPS existed for civilian use, although selective availability was in place, so its accuracy was very borderline for most purposes. Forget turn-by-turn navigation.
All that tech might have been possible, but it would be built into something the size of a briefcase (another popular item in that day). It would likely plug in to be used, like most cell phones of that era (maybe 12V in a car).
Any maps would have to be read off of CD-ROM, likely in a caddy like most drives of that era. The maps would be rendered on-screen in beautiful EGA, or maybe cutting-edge VGA at a whopping 320x200x8.
It would have been about as successful as the Newton, which itself would have been space-age tech at that time.
Depends on your definition of expert. If you define it as competence, chances are only another expert could determine whether he had it, and the court could not do so. If you define it as a big CV, as most courts do, then expertise generally represents your ability to pay for degrees/etc, and has nothing to do with your competence per-se.
And that explains quite a few court rulings over the years...
The truth, of course, has nothing to do with the ability of any individual or the court to recognize it.
Hate to double-reply, but I was reflecting on this further and since you seemed to be at least reasonably well versed in math I wanted to share my thoughts, which you might find useful.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument again that at the present overall vaccination rate the rational decision is to not vaccinate. Let's suppose that the ideal rate is 80% (an arbitrary value - s/80/x if you prefer).
If the rate is above 80% rational actors will choose not to vaccinate. If the rate is below 80% rational actors will choose to vaccinate. However, this isn't exactly true, since the rational actors probably don't base things off the vaccination rate itself, but rather on overall prevalence of the disease, which is of course a function of vaccination rate.
So, now we have defined a function that is self-correcting - an oscillator. If the output is above 80 it will have a downward force applied, and if it is below 80 it will have an upward force applied. A self-correcting function is dampened, and lots of interesting things can happen with dampened systems.
However, that corrective force is a function at best of overall vaccination rates, and at worst a function of disease infection rates. The former is probably reported to the public with a year or two lag, and the latter has a much longer delay since you need people to walk around, get sick, spread the disease, and then for the CDC or whatever to pick up on it and for figures to become accepted - perhaps 5-10 years could easily pass before the vaccination rate impacts published infection figures.
Any changes in the corrective force will therefore have a significant multi-year delay applied to them. Now let's talk about the corrective force.
People tend to over-react to news of health issues - just look at current vaccination trends as a result of Wakefield/etc. People will tend to not wait until science is established, but will rather take knee-jerk reactions. If there was a lot of evidence that DPT was net-harmful the vaccination rate wouldn't drop from 90 to 80, but probably from 90 to 30 or something like that.
So, what happens when you have a dampened function where the corrective action is large, and the delay in applying that correction is large? You get an overdampened system. Such a system will tend to oscillate wildly, and will spend very little time in the optimal range. If vaccine rates are low epidemics will break out, and everybody will get vaccinated bringing rates to 100%. Then after a decade of that the disease is nearly eradicated and pundits will talk about how the vaccine is more trouble than it is worth and rates will drop close to 0% until a substantial portion of the population is vulnerable, and then suddenly we'll have epidemics again.
So, even if you wanted to keep the overall rate near 80%, allowing individual decisions on the basis of your argument is not a way to accomplish this. If any engineer ran into a system that behaved as described they'd, well, engineer it better. That would involve replacing the control mechanism with one that worked better, either a complicated one that keeps rates near 80 (roll the dice and vaccinate accordingly, and punish doctors who deviate too far from the norm?), or a simple one that just pegs the rate at 100% since the outcome at 100% is way better than the outcome at 0%.
Again, I'm not convinced the odds really are as you suggest, but the fact is that individual actors making individual rational decisions in a situation like this can lead to very bad behavior, not unlike what is seen in dysfunctional stock markets and such.
Well, the parent mixed up two cases I think, because the end-run was actually done by MS.
However, let's ignore than and suppose that it was Apple. Nobody is questioning that the German court is able to enforce its injunctions, but only that such enforcement is likely to have little practical effect on the company it is issued against. The most the German court can do is block all imports of Apple products, and seize all Apple assets they have control over. Then all the US court has to do is have Motorola reimburse Apple for those losses in the US, and since both companies have more assets in the US than in Germany, in the end Apple comes out ahead despite losing the case in Germany.
This isn't unlike Slashdot geeks getting worked up about the RIAA and declaring that they're going to boycott any music purchases. The RIAA just yawns at the resulting 0.01% loss and keeps collecting their 99 cents/track while suing the parents of teenagers.
Now, again, the US case didn't involve Apple, so none of the above is actually going to happen. It is probably worth noting that inside the German market the actions of the German court certainly will have quite visible effects regardless.
Well, the problem here is the same problem that leads so many businesses to build warehouses full of cubicles when for a far lesser investment people could be just as effective working from home. Bosses like to survey their empires, and being able to hand out offices as perks makes them feel important. Even today in most offices looking busy matters more than being productive, and looking busy usually means putting out lots of fires. Effective and productive employees are usually given more work until they're no longer effective and productive. And so on...
And as a greater percentage of people opt out of vaccination, the potential harm due to not vaccination climbs, shifting the cost-benefit. Which means that somewhere, we'll hit a balance--not at 0% vaccination nor at 100% vaccination. It's not an all-or-nothing thing.
Ok, suppose the best cost-benefit is at 80% vaccination (again, for the sake of argument). How do you propose to achieve this?
By your math you'll always be better off as an individual not getting vaccinated. So, if you leave it up to individuals and let these facts be known, then you'll end up with a 0% vaccination rate, which by your own admission is not adequate.
The only way to end up with an 80% rate in a situation where individual decisions are rationally against vaccination is to mandate that doctors roll a d100 or something and vaccinate on a roll of 80 or below. Good luck getting that made policy. The only real way to achieve an 80% vaccination rate if your math is right is to mandate 100% coverage.
And this is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons.
Now, I'm not convinced that your math is right, but I'm conceding that for the sake of argument. Back in the 1930s they certainly didn't have any trouble getting people to take the vaccine, and it was no more effective or safe back then. Whooping cough, even for adults, isn't exactly a trivial problem.