The comments on the video are rather telling. A number of people claim the video must have been faked, because "The Chevy would have barely gotten scratched."
The people with the most to lose will always be the most motivated. In this case it's all those idiots who've turned their love of old cars into a religion. This video directly contradicts a long held belief that the old cars were somehow "safer".. so it just CAN'T be true!
Don't judge the masses on a few ignorant comments by a small number of vocal fanatics.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
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It's psychology, a lot of it working on autopilot, outside of conscious control.
You make it sound as if people aren't responsible for their own belief structures, and we're all just slaves to the unconscious. People can and do change. People should be held accountable for what they do, what they believe, and how they act. Any explanation or theory about consciousness is irrelevant. Would my best be enough?
Enough for what? Your best, or anyones best? You I don't know, but I have seen people whose "best" isn't adequate. Is your argument really that as long as people "do their best" they're somehow not responsible for their actions or should not be judged? There's just multiple problems with this point of view. How are we to know if people "do their best"? How do we know what "their best" is? If a bigots "best" is bigotry, that doesn't really excuse them from bigotry.
No, outcomes matter, not some unknowable hidden internal state of what someone believes about what they might be able to accomplish at that given moment.
In the absolute sense, no, the United States never made health-care a "right". If it had, it would be spelled out someplace in our Constitution or Bill of Rights.
Umm.. no. Your mistake is that you believe the Constitution is an enumeration of our rights, and anything NOT listed in the constitution is not a right. The framers of our constitution were very clear that the bill of rights and the constitution are limits on the GOVERNMENT, not a list of the only rights given to you. (See 9th Amendment). They actually foresaw that people such as yourself would miss-interpret the bill of rights to be a limit of the rights of the people, and not a limit on what the government is allowed to do. It's a common mistake, so I can see how you might think that way.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
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Let me guess the interviewer's reasons:
Or in other words "Make shit up" Finally, bicycling was outside of interviewer's comfort zone.
Is this a new code word I should be aware of that's used to justify inaccurate prejudices? If so, thanks for letting me know. The applicant would be also rejected if, considering other prejudices, he dresses up like a drug user, or like a prostitute, or like a gangster, or like a gay man, or like a skinhead, or like a cowboy...
This is kind of the point of the story, though strangely it sounds like you truly believe in it. Putting someone who uses a bicycle in the same category as gangsters, drug users, skinheads, or prostitutes is kind of odd. But thanks for proving my point for me.
The primary reason that we have such "insurance pools" in the first place is because of legislation that gives a favorable tax break to employers who provide health insurance coverage versus individuals purchasing them on their own.
The primary reason people get insurance through their employer is because of the tax breaks to employers. That really has little to do with the way the insurance business puts together pools of risks.
McCain's plan was extremely risky. (The guy IS a craps player after all, so he enjoys taking enormous risks. Just look at the Palin decision in that light for a minute). It MIGHT have worked if everything behaved the way we want it to. But it also could have failed catastrophically and we'd be worse off than we were before.
everybody expects their insurance to cover everything. The latter has largely caused the former.
Uhh.. Maybe. You can try to blame consumers here, but consumers generally are the ones with the least amount of power. The power brokers here are the insurance companies and the health care industry itself. One driver in the health care industry is doctors get paid more when they do more things. They don't get paid more when they provide better outcomes.
On a personal story, early this year my father was continually sick over much of the winter. He's retired and spends a winters in Florida. He went to his doctor in FL complaining of tiredness, his voice was weak, and a raft of other symptoms. He was checked into the hospital, they did a long series of tests (MRI, heart function tests, etc), and arrived at a diagnosis of diverticulitis and sent him home with a prescription for Cipro (an anti-biotic). He improved slightly. He later went to visit my sister in California, but soon was back in the hospital in California. They did more tests, and somehow found out he had been on Cipro several times years before (and his intestinal bugs had built up an immunity to Cipro). They sent him on his way with a prescription for a different anti-biotic and he went back to Florida. He still didn't improve and was sick most of the winter. Finally he came back to home to the Twin Cities, MN after 3 months in FL and dealing with two different medical systems in two different states. He went to see his doctor here. Within a week the doctor comes up with a diagnosis of hyper-thyroidism and gets him in to see an endocrinologist. The hyper-thyroidism was likely causes by a heart rhythm drug he was on. He got put on a drug to lower thyroid function (short term), and is doing much better, though not fully cured.
So.. a few months ago he gets the bill for his hospital stays in FL and CA. He spent a total of 3 days in the hospital, had no invasive procedures (though several tests). The total bill? $75,000, and they didn't really do anything that wound up finding out what was wrong. I don't know what his doctor visits in MN cost, but they sure as hell weren't anything near $75,000!
My conclusions about the health care system are that: Doctors aren't rewarded for outcomes, but are rewarded for procedures. Quality of health care varies greatly within the country.
My story is anecdotal of course, but it's also backed up by what "experts in the field" have been saying for years.
Maybe it isn't for YOU, but it is for people in many countries. In the United States it actually is an entitlement for people over 65, Veterans, the extremely poor, (and I think recently children?). So except for the majority of people in developed countries, and a significant portion of Americans, you're right. Among the major options that many right-leaning politicians in America have been pushing is tearing down regulation that has prevented insurance companies from offering low-cost catastrophic-only insurance, and removing regulation that prevents cross-state offerings for insurance.
His point wasn't that he couldn't get catastrophic only insurance, his point was that because of the way the insurance pools work, he had to pay a LOT more for as a self-employed individual than he and a large employer would pay when you join a much larger pool that large businesses can get into. For all we know catastrophic insurance was an option.
Just because it is a choice you don't like doesn't mean you don't have a choice. You ALWAYS have a choice,
Talk about bending over backwards to try to fit your own viewpoint into a word definition, sheesh. So using your definitions, if Charles Manson escaped from jail and kidnapped you and gave you the "choice" between strangling you, and shooting you, you shouldn't really complain about being murdered because Charlie is "nice" and gave you a "choice"? It seems you can't see the forest through the trees. And yet, ANY PERSON, regardless of insurance or socioeconomic status, is able to walk into an emergency room in America TODAY and receive full treatment without concern over the final cost.
Hahahah! Wow.. do you really believe that emergency rooms are really a good form of healthcare? The truth is that treating people in an emergency room is far more expensive than it would have been to treat someone BEFORE the problem got so bad they had to go to a emergency room. Your statement just astounds me in its ignorance. From a vaccination and public health standpoint and spread of disease standpoint ALONE it's idiotic to have an underclass of people with limited access to healthcare. Ever heard of herd immunity? Vaccines aren't 100% effective and never will be. Much of the protection you receive from life threatening illness is from other people being immunized against the disease. Having un-vaccinated people in the population is like having dry kindling in a forest. It only encourages disease to start and spread like a wildfire. There's a ton of reasons why Emergency only healthcare is simply idiotic. Do you really think that all illness is emergency only? You don't even have to be compassionate here. Your own greed and self interest can guide you away from this very stupid form of healthcare, if only you'd be a bit less ignorant. Sounds like an imperfect, but otherwise pretty good system to me. Why trash it?
Spoken by someone who's obviously in the 95% of the 85%, and has never had a life threatening illness. Did you understand that many people covered by health insurance go BANKRUPT who when they get a major illness like cancer and the health insurance provider cancels their policy?
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
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I think you're overstating the case just a bit. I have a co-worker who cycles 15 miles to work during spring-fall. He's never reported anyone throwing anything at him or people intentionally trying to harm him, mostly just people not paying attention. There's certainly a danger, but it's not malicious.
On the other hand 16 years ago I used to bicycle along roads a lot on the shoulder with plenty of room. A small minority of people would scream, yell, and honk their horns clearly to just be complete dickweeds.
I do have another story from the mid 90s though that supports your idea. (This story comes from a friend of mine). He was in college at the time and taking a bio-chemistry class. One day they had manager from Ecolab who was a guest speaker talking about life at Ecolab and whatnot. He spoke about one candidate for was interviewing for a job, who (as he put it in a derogatory tone) "RODE A BICYCLE TO THE INTERVIEW!!!". Riding a bike to the interview was just clearly a HUGE negative in this guys opinion. He just couldn't get over it, mentioned it several times. In his mind the bicycle rider was some kind of utter and complete freak, since NORMAL people drive cars to interviews.
So I think there's a small portion of people who never quite grew up, and think that riding bicycles is for only for children, or at least an indication of some form of "deviance".
I think his point is that dictators have often dehumanized the populace while raising the importance of a small minority. As soon as you start calling people "beasts" you can justify just about anything.
The lines you draw between "the proles" and "the intelligent" simply are artificial ones. It's not "us" against "them". I do recognize the strange backlash that's developed against intelligence and knowledge, but I think it's another case of a vocal minority trying to overstate its position.
You do far more damage to yourself and your group of "the intelligent" by taking the position and attitude you do. You're playing right into the hands of Fox News who paint anyone who disagrees with their politics as "elitist". Dividing the country along the lines you espouse can only lead to defeat for everyone.
Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development but the resulting technology, and the profits, will accrue to the US business and be taxed in the US.
Right. So the economic benefits will only go to a select few who (if successful) become super-rich. The lions share of the economic benefits will go outside the United States, as profit margins for the auto industry are typically in the single digits.
SO the best case scenario is that a few people in the US get super-rich and we get to tax what the super-rich haven't been able to hide away using creative accounting and loopholes. The worst case scenario is nobody in the US makes any money, the US Government loses the loan, and all the money we loaned out goes overseas. So how is this such a great economic idea?
I don't know about Washington, but my state, California has plenty of hits when you google "companies leaving California"...
California is one of the largest economies in the world. Companies move around all the time. It shouldn't be surprising that you'll get a lot of hits if you Google for "companies leaving California", since California has so many damn companies in it already.
The more important thing to look for is the growth rate. Are jobs being created in California? Is California's economy growing? The number of companies leaving California is meaningless by itself.
So your serious solution was to hire someone you don't know to lean on someone else you don't know in a country thousands of miles away that's well known for being extremely corrupt? No wonder they looked at you like you were green. What makes you think your hired goons are on your side, or wouldn't sell you out the first chance it made sense?
There's two kinds of people in the world: Carnies and Rubes. Carnies are the people that are skeptical and always looking for the angle. The rubes are the people who see everything at face value.
Privacy and security really aren't a lot more than trying to not be a rube. The carnies try to trick the rubes into giving away information, or taking over their computer by installing some piece of software. We all know about the "virus scanner" sites that pop up now and again. Tricker are the "open the file in this email and follow instructions" email.
Sadly, people aren't trained much beyond the level of "don't click on the wrong link!!" form of security. You're never going to be able to tell people all the latest scams, since there's a new one every day. The best you can do is try to get them to look for the angle. People will respond to this because they can relate to it (a friend of mine calls it "the down home cynicism".
You seemed to have missed the point. The entire world is not going to adjust its behavior for a tiny percentage of people with a severe reaction to peanuts. Peanuts are everywhere, and if someone has such an incredible sensitivity to it then they need to figure out a way to live with that and not expect (in this case) an entire school of perhaps a thousand people to not eat peanuts or bring peanuts to school. What I would or wouldn't do is irrelevant.
You might just want to look into taking some refresher mathematics classes. 60 watts-15 watts= 45 watts savings for the CFL. 60-7=53 watts savings for the LED. 53-45= 8 additional watts savings of the LED over the CFL. 8 watts additional/45 watts CFL is about an additional 18% over savings going from CFL to LED. That's a LONG way from the additional 100% you calculated using the wrong math.
I can certainly imagine a regular public school banning PB&J sandwiches to avoid causing a reaction if someone with extreme peanut allergies was in attendance.
You know what? The world is never going to accommodate this level of extremeness. If someone really has this extreme a sensitivity to an everyday item, it's not the of everyone else around you to adjust their behavior to accommodate them.
Let's say you can somehow get away with this in school. What happens the rest of the kids life when they might walk by someone eating peanuts? Last I heard there were treatments that can reduce peanut allergy sensitivity down the level where even extremely sensitive people could get to the level where they can tolerate eating small amounts of peanuts. I guess I also have my doubts that merely SMELLING peanuts is actually dangerous for certain people, and not merely a purely psychological reaction brought on by nutty parents.
Malthus argued that we can never rise above subsistence poverty because the population will always expand to consume the resources. He was wrong about that since he didn't foresee people voluntarily controlling birth rates once their children gained the ability to survive with a high likelihood.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc.
Which is the same theory Thomas Malthus had in the early 1800s. Fortunately for us he turned out to be wrong. A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
People don't have a lot of children because they don't understand what birth control is. People have a lot of children in high mortality rate parts of the world to guarantee some of them will live to adulthood. Part of the mortality rate is from malnutrition. Birth control and education are also part of the solution. But frankly nobody is going to be taking birth control and extending their educations when they can't feed themselves.
That's very true for diseases like the common cold and many other diseases. It remains to be seen if it's true for influenza. Within the last year or two there's some new data from a doctor who studied influenza transmission in Guinea pigs. The main results were that influenza is spread through water droplets in the air. The main factors that contributed to transmission were a temperature and humidity. Low temperature and low humidity (like we experience in winter) were optimal for spreading influenza.
It's still possible that hands might also spread flu, and it certainly spreads other diseases so you advice isn't bad. It's just likely that flu is spread through aerosol, not physical contact.
Whats the point trying to defeat a generally true argument simply because there is a probability that it has minor falsehoods?
Defeat? No. Temper? Yes. It's more true than not, but there's certainly a lot wrong with just assuming anyone with a higher degree in something "knows what they're talking about". And your first line is just a vague attempt to justify laziness.
I'm not sure how you're getting that, but perhaps someday you'll learn how valuable a skill laziness can be. As far as which causes which, in the absence of evidence your explanation is just as likely as mine. it just makes you look like you're scraping the bowl for answers.
Scrape the bottom of the bowl enough and perhaps you'll scrape away enough to see through the bowl.
You sound like you're desperately afraid of being inadequate, or being "found out". I don't know if you have some advanced degree, or merely desire it. In any case I hope you figure out it's not all it's cracked up to be.
The question you should really be asking is whether the school has decided to require everyone to use Microsoft everything or if they've chosen to support standards. This boils down to supporting HTML standards so non-IE browsers work, supporting SMTP/IMAP for email instead of Exchange, using PDFs instead of -latest word format-, etc.
In that kind of environment it doesn't really matter what OS you use. If your daughter already knows all the linux stuff anyway, what do you need the IT guy for? You're going to essentially be the support guy for anything hard anyway.
one being that the more higher educated people become the less they are interested in money.
Or maybe it means the more interested in money you are, the less likely you are to become highly educated. It also means you know what you're talking about in your field.
Wow, that'd be nice. Anytime we want to know something with certainty all we have to do is just ask a Phd. in that field what the right answer is! I don't doubt there's a correlation between education in a field and knowledge in it. But you have to admit there's a lot of people with Phd's speaking about their field who really shouldn't be.
Lung Cancer has gone from 20 deaths per 100,000 people in the United States to about 80 per 100,000 today.
You don't cite what year the 20 per 100,000 rate is from. I will tell you that Lung cancer takes 20 years to develop, so a high rate of smoking in the past (like we had in the 40s-60s) will lead to higher cancer rates 20 years down the road.
(oh, and you might want to note that Lung cancer rates are generally going DOWN since 1991, not up)
So there's really no reason to look to exotic causes of lung cancer. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there's more pollution now than there was 30 or 40 years ago, or where this new "Radiation" that somehow is floating through the air in supposed greater quantities is.
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The comments on the video are rather telling. A number of people claim the video must have been faked, because "The Chevy would have barely gotten scratched."
The people with the most to lose will always be the most motivated. In this case it's all those idiots who've turned their love of old cars into a religion. This video directly contradicts a long held belief that the old cars were somehow "safer".. so it just CAN'T be true!
Don't judge the masses on a few ignorant comments by a small number of vocal fanatics.
It's psychology, a lot of it working on autopilot, outside of conscious control.
You make it sound as if people aren't responsible for their own belief structures, and we're all just slaves to the unconscious. People can and do change. People should be held accountable for what they do, what they believe, and how they act. Any explanation or theory about consciousness is irrelevant.
Would my best be enough?
Enough for what? Your best, or anyones best? You I don't know, but I have seen people whose "best" isn't adequate. Is your argument really that as long as people "do their best" they're somehow not responsible for their actions or should not be judged? There's just multiple problems with this point of view. How are we to know if people "do their best"? How do we know what "their best" is? If a bigots "best" is bigotry, that doesn't really excuse them from bigotry.
No, outcomes matter, not some unknowable hidden internal state of what someone believes about what they might be able to accomplish at that given moment.
In the absolute sense, no, the United States never made health-care a "right". If it had, it would be spelled out someplace in our Constitution or Bill of Rights.
Umm.. no. Your mistake is that you believe the Constitution is an enumeration of our rights, and anything NOT listed in the constitution is not a right. The framers of our constitution were very clear that the bill of rights and the constitution are limits on the GOVERNMENT, not a list of the only rights given to you. (See 9th Amendment). They actually foresaw that people such as yourself would miss-interpret the bill of rights to be a limit of the rights of the people, and not a limit on what the government is allowed to do. It's a common mistake, so I can see how you might think that way.
Let me guess the interviewer's reasons:
Or in other words "Make shit up"
Finally, bicycling was outside of interviewer's comfort zone.
Is this a new code word I should be aware of that's used to justify inaccurate prejudices? If so, thanks for letting me know.
The applicant would be also rejected if, considering other prejudices, he dresses up like a drug user, or like a prostitute, or like a gangster, or like a gay man, or like a skinhead, or like a cowboy...
This is kind of the point of the story, though strangely it sounds like you truly believe in it. Putting someone who uses a bicycle in the same category as gangsters, drug users, skinheads, or prostitutes is kind of odd. But thanks for proving my point for me.
The primary reason that we have such "insurance pools" in the first place is because of legislation that gives a favorable tax break to employers who provide health insurance coverage versus individuals purchasing them on their own.
The primary reason people get insurance through their employer is because of the tax breaks to employers. That really has little to do with the way the insurance business puts together pools of risks.
McCain's plan was extremely risky. (The guy IS a craps player after all, so he enjoys taking enormous risks. Just look at the Palin decision in that light for a minute). It MIGHT have worked if everything behaved the way we want it to. But it also could have failed catastrophically and we'd be worse off than we were before.
everybody expects their insurance to cover everything. The latter has largely caused the former.
Uhh.. Maybe. You can try to blame consumers here, but consumers generally are the ones with the least amount of power. The power brokers here are the insurance companies and the health care industry itself. One driver in the health care industry is doctors get paid more when they do more things. They don't get paid more when they provide better outcomes.
On a personal story, early this year my father was continually sick over much of the winter. He's retired and spends a winters in Florida. He went to his doctor in FL complaining of tiredness, his voice was weak, and a raft of other symptoms. He was checked into the hospital, they did a long series of tests (MRI, heart function tests, etc), and arrived at a diagnosis of diverticulitis and sent him home with a prescription for Cipro (an anti-biotic). He improved slightly. He later went to visit my sister in California, but soon was back in the hospital in California. They did more tests, and somehow found out he had been on Cipro several times years before (and his intestinal bugs had built up an immunity to Cipro). They sent him on his way with a prescription for a different anti-biotic and he went back to Florida. He still didn't improve and was sick most of the winter. Finally he came back to home to the Twin Cities, MN after 3 months in FL and dealing with two different medical systems in two different states. He went to see his doctor here. Within a week the doctor comes up with a diagnosis of hyper-thyroidism and gets him in to see an endocrinologist. The hyper-thyroidism was likely causes by a heart rhythm drug he was on. He got put on a drug to lower thyroid function (short term), and is doing much better, though not fully cured.
So.. a few months ago he gets the bill for his hospital stays in FL and CA. He spent a total of 3 days in the hospital, had no invasive procedures (though several tests). The total bill? $75,000, and they didn't really do anything that wound up finding out what was wrong. I don't know what his doctor visits in MN cost, but they sure as hell weren't anything near $75,000!
My conclusions about the health care system are that:
Doctors aren't rewarded for outcomes, but are rewarded for procedures.
Quality of health care varies greatly within the country.
My story is anecdotal of course, but it's also backed up by what "experts in the field" have been saying for years.
Health care is not an entitlement or a right.
Maybe it isn't for YOU, but it is for people in many countries. In the United States it actually is an entitlement for people over 65, Veterans, the extremely poor, (and I think recently children?). So except for the majority of people in developed countries, and a significant portion of Americans, you're right.
Among the major options that many right-leaning politicians in America have been pushing is tearing down regulation that has prevented insurance companies from offering low-cost catastrophic-only insurance, and removing regulation that prevents cross-state offerings for insurance.
His point wasn't that he couldn't get catastrophic only insurance, his point was that because of the way the insurance pools work, he had to pay a LOT more for as a self-employed individual than he and a large employer would pay when you join a much larger pool that large businesses can get into. For all we know catastrophic insurance was an option.
Just because it is a choice you don't like doesn't mean you don't have a choice. You ALWAYS have a choice,
Talk about bending over backwards to try to fit your own viewpoint into a word definition, sheesh. So using your definitions, if Charles Manson escaped from jail and kidnapped you and gave you the "choice" between strangling you, and shooting you, you shouldn't really complain about being murdered because Charlie is "nice" and gave you a "choice"? It seems you can't see the forest through the trees.
And yet, ANY PERSON, regardless of insurance or socioeconomic status, is able to walk into an emergency room in America TODAY and receive full treatment without concern over the final cost.
Hahahah! Wow.. do you really believe that emergency rooms are really a good form of healthcare? The truth is that treating people in an emergency room is far more expensive than it would have been to treat someone BEFORE the problem got so bad they had to go to a emergency room. Your statement just astounds me in its ignorance. From a vaccination and public health standpoint and spread of disease standpoint ALONE it's idiotic to have an underclass of people with limited access to healthcare. Ever heard of herd immunity? Vaccines aren't 100% effective and never will be. Much of the protection you receive from life threatening illness is from other people being immunized against the disease. Having un-vaccinated people in the population is like having dry kindling in a forest. It only encourages disease to start and spread like a wildfire. There's a ton of reasons why Emergency only healthcare is simply idiotic. Do you really think that all illness is emergency only? You don't even have to be compassionate here. Your own greed and self interest can guide you away from this very stupid form of healthcare, if only you'd be a bit less ignorant.
Sounds like an imperfect, but otherwise pretty good system to me. Why trash it?
Spoken by someone who's obviously in the 95% of the 85%, and has never had a life threatening illness. Did you understand that many people covered by health insurance go BANKRUPT who when they get a major illness like cancer and the health insurance provider cancels their policy?
I think you're overstating the case just a bit. I have a co-worker who cycles 15 miles to work during spring-fall. He's never reported anyone throwing anything at him or people intentionally trying to harm him, mostly just people not paying attention. There's certainly a danger, but it's not malicious.
On the other hand 16 years ago I used to bicycle along roads a lot on the shoulder with plenty of room. A small minority of people would scream, yell, and honk their horns clearly to just be complete dickweeds.
I do have another story from the mid 90s though that supports your idea. (This story comes from a friend of mine). He was in college at the time and taking a bio-chemistry class. One day they had manager from Ecolab who was a guest speaker talking about life at Ecolab and whatnot. He spoke about one candidate for was interviewing for a job, who (as he put it in a derogatory tone) "RODE A BICYCLE TO THE INTERVIEW!!!". Riding a bike to the interview was just clearly a HUGE negative in this guys opinion. He just couldn't get over it, mentioned it several times. In his mind the bicycle rider was some kind of utter and complete freak, since NORMAL people drive cars to interviews.
So I think there's a small portion of people who never quite grew up, and think that riding bicycles is for only for children, or at least an indication of some form of "deviance".
And I don't think that joke is as funny as you think it is.
I think his point is that dictators have often dehumanized the populace while raising the importance of a small minority. As soon as you start calling people "beasts" you can justify just about anything.
The lines you draw between "the proles" and "the intelligent" simply are artificial ones. It's not "us" against "them". I do recognize the strange backlash that's developed against intelligence and knowledge, but I think it's another case of a vocal minority trying to overstate its position.
You do far more damage to yourself and your group of "the intelligent" by taking the position and attitude you do. You're playing right into the hands of Fox News who paint anyone who disagrees with their politics as "elitist". Dividing the country along the lines you espouse can only lead to defeat for everyone.
Fisker is essentially outsourcing every aspect of their development but the resulting technology, and the profits, will accrue to the US business and be taxed in the US.
Right. So the economic benefits will only go to a select few who (if successful) become super-rich. The lions share of the economic benefits will go outside the United States, as profit margins for the auto industry are typically in the single digits.
SO the best case scenario is that a few people in the US get super-rich and we get to tax what the super-rich haven't been able to hide away using creative accounting and loopholes. The worst case scenario is nobody in the US makes any money, the US Government loses the loan, and all the money we loaned out goes overseas. So how is this such a great economic idea?
I don't know about Washington, but my state, California has plenty of hits when you google "companies leaving California"...
California is one of the largest economies in the world. Companies move around all the time. It shouldn't be surprising that you'll get a lot of hits if you Google for "companies leaving California", since California has so many damn companies in it already.
The more important thing to look for is the growth rate. Are jobs being created in California? Is California's economy growing? The number of companies leaving California is meaningless by itself.
So your serious solution was to hire someone you don't know to lean on someone else you don't know in a country thousands of miles away that's well known for being extremely corrupt? No wonder they looked at you like you were green. What makes you think your hired goons are on your side, or wouldn't sell you out the first chance it made sense?
There's two kinds of people in the world: Carnies and Rubes. Carnies are the people that are skeptical and always looking for the angle. The rubes are the people who see everything at face value.
Privacy and security really aren't a lot more than trying to not be a rube. The carnies try to trick the rubes into giving away information, or taking over their computer by installing some piece of software. We all know about the "virus scanner" sites that pop up now and again. Tricker are the "open the file in this email and follow instructions" email.
Sadly, people aren't trained much beyond the level of "don't click on the wrong link!!" form of security. You're never going to be able to tell people all the latest scams, since there's a new one every day. The best you can do is try to get them to look for the angle. People will respond to this because they can relate to it (a friend of mine calls it "the down home cynicism".
You seemed to have missed the point. The entire world is not going to adjust its behavior for a tiny percentage of people with a severe reaction to peanuts. Peanuts are everywhere, and if someone has such an incredible sensitivity to it then they need to figure out a way to live with that and not expect (in this case) an entire school of perhaps a thousand people to not eat peanuts or bring peanuts to school. What I would or wouldn't do is irrelevant.
You might just want to look into taking some refresher mathematics classes. 60 watts-15 watts= 45 watts savings for the CFL. 60-7=53 watts savings for the LED. 53-45= 8 additional watts savings of the LED over the CFL. 8 watts additional/45 watts CFL is about an additional 18% over savings going from CFL to LED. That's a LONG way from the additional 100% you calculated using the wrong math.
I can certainly imagine a regular public school banning PB&J sandwiches to avoid causing a reaction if someone with extreme peanut allergies was in attendance.
You know what? The world is never going to accommodate this level of extremeness. If someone really has this extreme a sensitivity to an everyday item, it's not the of everyone else around you to adjust their behavior to accommodate them.
Let's say you can somehow get away with this in school. What happens the rest of the kids life when they might walk by someone eating peanuts? Last I heard there were treatments that can reduce peanut allergy sensitivity down the level where even extremely sensitive people could get to the level where they can tolerate eating small amounts of peanuts. I guess I also have my doubts that merely SMELLING peanuts is actually dangerous for certain people, and not merely a purely psychological reaction brought on by nutty parents.
Malthus argued that we can never rise above subsistence poverty because the population will always expand to consume the resources. He was wrong about that since he didn't foresee people voluntarily controlling birth rates once their children gained the ability to survive with a high likelihood.
Sooner or later you hit a limiting resource. Land, water, energy etc.
Which is the same theory Thomas Malthus had in the early 1800s. Fortunately for us he turned out to be wrong.
A better investment would have birth control and birth control education.
People don't have a lot of children because they don't understand what birth control is. People have a lot of children in high mortality rate parts of the world to guarantee some of them will live to adulthood. Part of the mortality rate is from malnutrition. Birth control and education are also part of the solution. But frankly nobody is going to be taking birth control and extending their educations when they can't feed themselves.
The question of whether viruses are living things is far from clear-cut.
The question of whether viruses are alive or not is as interesting a question as whether submarines swim. (To steal a phrase for Dijkstra).
We know what viruses do and don't do. Arguing about whether they're "alive" or not is purely semantics and is not a scientific question at all.
That's very true for diseases like the common cold and many other diseases. It remains to be seen if it's true for influenza. Within the last year or two there's some new data from a doctor who studied influenza transmission in Guinea pigs. The main results were that influenza is spread through water droplets in the air. The main factors that contributed to transmission were a temperature and humidity. Low temperature and low humidity (like we experience in winter) were optimal for spreading influenza.
It's still possible that hands might also spread flu, and it certainly spreads other diseases so you advice isn't bad. It's just likely that flu is spread through aerosol, not physical contact.
Whats the point trying to defeat a generally true argument simply because there is a probability that it has minor falsehoods?
Defeat? No. Temper? Yes. It's more true than not, but there's certainly a lot wrong with just assuming anyone with a higher degree in something "knows what they're talking about".
And your first line is just a vague attempt to justify laziness.
I'm not sure how you're getting that, but perhaps someday you'll learn how valuable a skill laziness can be. As far as which causes which, in the absence of evidence your explanation is just as likely as mine.
it just makes you look like you're scraping the bowl for answers.
Scrape the bottom of the bowl enough and perhaps you'll scrape away enough to see through the bowl.
You sound like you're desperately afraid of being inadequate, or being "found out". I don't know if you have some advanced degree, or merely desire it. In any case I hope you figure out it's not all it's cracked up to be.
The question you should really be asking is whether the school has decided to require everyone to use Microsoft everything or if they've chosen to support standards. This boils down to supporting HTML standards so non-IE browsers work, supporting SMTP/IMAP for email instead of Exchange, using PDFs instead of -latest word format-, etc.
In that kind of environment it doesn't really matter what OS you use. If your daughter already knows all the linux stuff anyway, what do you need the IT guy for? You're going to essentially be the support guy for anything hard anyway.
one being that the more higher educated people become the less they are interested in money.
Or maybe it means the more interested in money you are, the less likely you are to become highly educated.
It also means you know what you're talking about in your field.
Wow, that'd be nice. Anytime we want to know something with certainty all we have to do is just ask a Phd. in that field what the right answer is! I don't doubt there's a correlation between education in a field and knowledge in it. But you have to admit there's a lot of people with Phd's speaking about their field who really shouldn't be.
Lung Cancer has gone from 20 deaths per 100,000 people in the United States to about 80 per 100,000 today.
You don't cite what year the 20 per 100,000 rate is from. I will tell you that Lung cancer takes 20 years to develop, so a high rate of smoking in the past (like we had in the 40s-60s) will lead to higher cancer rates 20 years down the road.
(oh, and you might want to note that Lung cancer rates are generally going DOWN since 1991, not up)
Here's a link to some sited statistics with years and scientific evidence behind it:
http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/statistics/trends.htm
So there's really no reason to look to exotic causes of lung cancer. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there's more pollution now than there was 30 or 40 years ago, or where this new "Radiation" that somehow is floating through the air in supposed greater quantities is.