It has the potential to alter the entire face of the planet - every. single. living. thing.
And here's a demonstration of the fear-mongering sky-is-falling anti-GMO attitude.
But instead, humans set it upon the Earth for nothing more than oral pleasure.
Yes, I suppose you could call being able to feed the growing number of people on a planet that isn't getting bigger "oral pleasure", but when you put it that way you only make yourself look arrogant, ignorant, and sociopathic.
This is FARM RAISED SALMON. If you are that picky about your salmon you aren't going to buy artificially grown salmon anyway, you're going to stick with fresh caught.
Second, we eat DNA and RNA EVERY DAY. From all kinds of things. We DIGEST DNA and RNA. Stomach acid does a pretty good job of denaturing things like that. You aren't going to start growing gills just because you ate some fish DNA. Your cells aren't going to suck in the RNA and start turning you into the Jolly Green Giant with scales.
Third, "There are multiple physical barriers to prevent AquAdvantage fish or their eggs from slipping out through these farms' plumbing systems." (I'd provide a link to that quote, but it's already linked to in the summary and if you didn't read it there I doubt you're going to read it now.)
Fourth, even if some do escape, "it would not matter because the AquAdvantage Salmon are reproductively sterile." You know what sterile means, don't you? If YOU are, it means even if you ever do find a girlfriend you couldn't get her pregnant. Same for the fish. They cannot reproduce in the wild. If 1000 do ever manage the "Great Escape" by having Hiltz and Willie dig a tunnel out, that will be 1000 fish out an entire ocean that MIGHT get caught and poison you. But only you, because this RNA was designed specifically to kill you and only you.
Having the FDA force the company to put a warning label on this product only feeds the kind of ignorant fear that you have shown here. Even people who don't really care will see a warning label and wonder if there isn't something wrong if there needs to be a warning label on it. They see warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol that threaten all kinds of bad things for using those products, and they hear "you can die if you take this drug" on drug ads. They will buy cigs and drugs because they are addicted or need the medicinal effects (of the latter), but they won't buy the fish. Why should they? There's a warning that it is bad for them, and right next to it in the grocer's freezer is a box of fish with no warning. And yet, people like you can prove nothing wrong or dangerous about the product. You can only spout heaps of ignorant hyperbole about it effecting the whole planet.
Now, California has done a lot to help desensitize the public to government-mandated warning labels, what with their "known to the State of California" cancer labels on just about everything, so the chilling effect on sales will be lessened a bit, but only a bit.
Think about it, if I offered you two candy bars and one had a government warning label about the dangers of consuming it, and the other did not (and they were the same candy bar, differing only in the labelling) which one would YOU take?
Universities need a way to determine whether or not the accused should be punished for violating the student code of conduct (just like they would, say, for plagiarism violations or academic cheating).
The difference is that plagiarism or cheating are University-based offenses that involve the university directly. Rape is a criminal act covered by local, state, and federal laws, but has no direct connection to the University. No, someone living in a dorm doesn't make everything they do a University problem, and someone living off-campus (in a frat or sorority, or just an apartment) even less so. At least, it shouldn't. And not when there are police and courts all set up to deal with this.
As for this app, it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone (male or female, by the way) reports a rape but doesn't realize the "keep it a secret until later" function is active. He wonders why nobody does anything. Then a dozen years later he sues because the University didn't do enough.
The day I walked into my doctor's office, he had a treatment plan. First, try topicals - starting with the least invasive and most likely to succeed. If no response,...
Good for him. But how did he know there was no response unless he LISTENED TO YOU? You do realize, I hope, that for many, if not most, medical issues the blood test numbers and CAT scan results don't tell the whole story. (Like the ACE inhibitor I was on that gave great blood results but had a side effect that could become permanent had it continued.)
And what if there was a complete resolution of your initial medical issue but you were having side effects that impacted your quality of life? He's not supposed to listen to you talk about that, he's supposed to say "if this other drug was right for you I would have prescribed it for you." That's what you want your doctor to say.
The entire time, he knew more about my condition and the available treatments than I could have possibly picked up from commercials or magazine ads.
Of course. You seem to think that the only source of information for people is television ads. That's just ridiculous. Ads are just one source. You want them stopped so that source is gone. Why? Because you want your doctor to tell you what to do and not have to face questions from his patients about other possible treatments. That's also ridiculous.
Of course he was receptive to hear how I was feeling and reacting to the medication, but he didn't need to know about treatment options.
He needed to LISTEN TO YOU, which is what I said. About more than just your symptoms. Apparently he did, but you stick to your guns and think that a system where doctors dismiss patient questions with a curt "I know better" attitude is the right way to do medicine. That's just, well, ridiculous.
And if your patient comes in and says "How about Orencia? I saw a commercial for it yesterday" and you say anything other than "I would have put you on it already if I thought it was right for you", then you shouldn't be practicing.
No, if that is what your doctor tells you, find a good doctor that includes you in the process of managing your health. Arrogance like that does not belong in the exam room. If your patient is asking you about using a different drug then there is obviously something less than optimal about the drug he's on.
At WORST, the doctor should say that it isn't appropriate, if it isn't, or ask why the patient is asking if it is. The current drug isn't necessarily the best one just because that's the one the doctor was most familiar with when you got your prescription.
Perhaps what you don't understand is that there is often half a dozen different drugs that can manage some problem equally well, and the one that is used will depend on patient tolerance, availability, cost, and doctor education. As I posted elsewhere, there were multiple options for one of the drugs I was taking. An arrogant doctor would say "I would have put you on a different one if I thought it was right for you" when I told him it wasn't right for me. A good doctor LISTENED and realized his first choice wasn't the best. I've been to both kinds, and I know why a good listener is better than an arrogant autocrat.
Um, no. Let's start out with what the hell do you know about the ->PRESCRIPTION- drug being advertised?
You mean after I go online and look up the prescribing information, the mechanism of action, the contraindications and potential side effects? Why nothing at all. No, it is impossible for anyone who isn't a doctor to find out this stuff.
Are you just going to google it, and see what Dr. Oz says about it?
Why would I care what an idiot who has nothing to do with me or my life says about it? I've watched about ten minutes of that fellow's TV show and it was easy to determine that he was a hypocrite who is in it for the money. As I recall, it was two segments back to back where one said carbs are good, the next was carbs are bad. Both were simplistic nonsense.
I mean, really, what do you know about any prescription drugs, other than what you're taking...
Quite a bit, thank you.
. and most people have no clue at all, other than "I take some kinda red pill for sump'n".
So what? So they bring up drug X with their doctor and he tells them it either isn't appropriate or that it is. They don't just run out and buy a buttload of it and start popping it like candy. I mean, there are a lot more ads of other kinds that ought to be banned if you are concerned that some of the people who watch them are too stupid to use the products being sold properly. You know, you can choke to death on a whopper if you don't eat it right, and if you can't swim then going out in a boat can be deadly. And if you are a klutz and you buy a knife from one of those infomercials that sell 300 knives for $10, you could DIE! Ban that infomercial because of stupid people?
And the ads don't tell you anything (right, you actually read all of that 1pt type, and understand it all).
A lot of the ads tell you quite a bit, and even if they don't tell you everything there's this wonderful new invention called "the interwebs" where you can go look stuff up. For example, there are two new drugs for type II diabetes which act by inhibiting glucose re-uptake in the kidneys. The ads are actually pretty clear about what they do, and hypoglycemia is clearly stated as a potential side effect. The web has more on them, but you'd never be able to google for them because you wouldn't guess their names.
It's not free speech, it's garbage.
Oh, please. It saves a lot of people a lot of time having to scour the web for everything that might be new and gives them a name to go look up. It's very much harder to find out about a new drug if you don't even know its name.
And until the mid/late nineties, it was banned.
And then we stopped treating the people like morons and doctors like Gods and removed the ban. If you haven't noticed, there are lots of things that used to be done a certain way that we don't do that way anymore. The fact it was banned is irrelevant; the fact the ban went away is a bit more.
How has such advertising helped you, personally?
It has let me know the existence of specific new drugs that I can go research and consider suggesting to my doctor as replacements for current prescriptions, without me having to spend countless hours repeatedly looking online to see what might have popped up in the last month. It's a "push notification", like the AOL "you've got mail" announcement that relieves people from the task of looking at their mailbox every ten minutes to see if anything new has come in.
There's an ad I saw just last night for a new drug that could be a replacement for one I'm taking now. From information in the ad itself I am pretty sure that it isn't appropriate, but I want to know its mechanism of action so I can see if there might be something else in the pipeline that is appropriate. I had never heard of it before, and my doctor
I did say "about treatment", not "about symptoms".
And I did say a lot about other things than just symptoms. Like the treatment being used.
You can listen to all the symptoms and come up with the perfect drug to use in the perfect amount, but if you don't listen to the patient telling you that he cannot manage to follow the strict protocols that drug requires, or cannot afford it, or has other limitations, or is experiencing side effects, you're a pathetic excuse for a doctor and should not be practicing.
I've found that WebMD is a good resource to find out what to "ask your doctor" about.
What do you ask WebMD about? And do you have to go wander about WebMD every three days, every week, every month, to find out the new stuff? Sounds a lot more ineffective than having a pointer pop up on the telly bringing something new to your attention so that you can THEN go to WebMD and wade through their website looking for data.
Personally, I've found WebMD very unfriendly for simple information.
Of course not. He just wants it to change into something completely different. "I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream." It's called "stock car" for a reason.
Why the hell would you even ask your doctor if he's already prescribing something else for you?
Because you might feel that a different drug will have a different impact on your life. For whatever reason. It's your life, shouldn't you have input into the decision?
It's like an ordinary user of Windows making suggestions as to how to administer a Linux server.
Nope. It's like the owner of a linux server making suggestions to the admin on what software he wants installed.
The doctor is not the one in charge of your health. You are.
And the ad budget for that crap raises the price of the drug above and beyond what the execs "need" for their annual bonus.
You realize that the purpose of advertising is to increase sales, and that if any company (pharma, car, soft drink, anything) doesn't get the money they put into advertising back through sales then they don't advertise.
In order for direct advertisements to work, doctors must be listening to their patients about treatment instead of the other way around. That sounds like a dysfunctional system to me.
You've got to be kidding, right? A doctor that doesn't listen to the patient is a functional system?
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. A doctor that doesn't listen to the patient will not hear that the patient is having a life threatening side effect from the drug the doctor's told him to take. He won't hear about just inconveniencing side effects. He won't hear about difficulties the patient is having following the course of treatment. He won't hear any of the concerns the patient has.
A doctor that isn't listening is a quack and a pill-pusher and needs to be removed from practice, not held up as an example of functional medicine.
Is it reasonable to expect ill people to make rational decisions?
If they are unconscious, no. If they are conscious and alert, of course. Why would having diabetes or a UTI make someone incapable of making a rational decision?
And let's not pretend anyone is unaffected by ads, like it or not you are affected.
Yes, of course. There are existing checks and balances on the system, however, so you can be "affected" by ads and not wind up being a user.
If my doctor doesn't already know whether X is right for me, then I need to get a new doctor.
Hardly.
For many things, the doctor knows about you only what you've told him. He prescribes drugs that can have side-effects that he doesn't know you are having unless you are aware of them and tell him.
We found out I was allergic to ACE inhibitors only because I mentioned that I was having a slight cough. It wasn't significant enough to me to bring up as an issue, and he saw my blood work come back with good numbers. Until that moment, he thought X was right for me. Then we went to Y.
On the opposite hand, the doctor can know that X is right for you medically, but you may have other considerations that make Y the correct course. If the doctor only said "take X" and you didn't know about Y, you'd not know that Y was better overall.
I've always thought that this was incredibly irresponsible to be promoting the idea that the average slob off the street
At the point you are diagnosed with disease Y you are no longer an "average slob off the street", you are someone who has a vested interest in treating disease Y. You don't need 10 years of post-secondary education to be able to look through potential treatments and read the documentation. You need the 10 years so you can understand all the interactions of the systems and potential seriousness of side effects and interactions.
"end users, ask your sysadmin if systemd is right for you."
Analogy fail. The system administrator is the person responsible for administering the system the end users use. The PATIENT is the person ultimately responsible for the health of the patient.
In other words, doctors would have to pay for an expensive subscription to look at ads.
No, of course not. They're expected to live near enough to a library that has a subscription and take an hour or two out of their schedule every few days to run over to peruse the journals for interesting stuff.
Just like Joe Sixpack is supposed to, and if the library is good they'll also have a medical dictionary to translate the big words into stuff the layman can understand.
It's the most productive use of everyone's time, after all.
Medical journals cover the extent to which doctors actually need to be informed about this stuff.
Doctors already work a lot talking to patients, and are expected to be current on everything. When do they find time to read journals on the off chance they might find a reference to a new drug that they can use?
And when, exactly, is the general public supposed to read those medical journals to see if there is a development that might be beneficial to them? You don't really believe that the doctor is supposed to be the sole source of medical information for patients, and has sole responsibility for keeping them informed of developments, do you?
For example, my MD made a comment a year or so ago about a new type of drug that can help keep blood sugar levels down. It wasn't ready yet. He hasn't had to waste his time talking with me about it because I saw it advertised (gasp!) and was able to gather the information by myself. And just last night, an ad (gasp!) let me know there is another drug that might be relevant which I can now go look up.
You see, it is not just his job to manage my health, it is mine, and I have should have the information in a form I can use to do that. That means that an ad that tells me there is something new to study up on is much better than having to find the time to read through medical journals every week looking for references.
Yeah, I get sick and tired of the "Cialis for ED" soft-porn ads, but not every ad is targeted at or useful to everyone. I also get sick and tired of the Bear Grylls "explosion of pus in my mouth" ad on BBC America, and ads for hamsters driving Kias, but that's life.
Thank you for proving my point better than I could ever do. Your faith in your logical reasoning about God is shining through with every word. Faith. God cannot exist because I don't understand how he could hold a hammer, and I have ultimate faith in my ability to understand.
Let's go back 200 years and ask this: how could we hear a man's voice if he were not in the room speaking to us? Let's go back 20 years: how can we put five hours of music recording into something that is smaller than one of Aunt Martha's compacts? How can a man walk on the moon when there is no air? Clearly such ideas are irrational and impossible.
It is as much an act of faith so claim god in all probability doesn't exist based on the evidence as it is to say that in all likelihood unicorns don't exist based on the evidence.
I've covered that error already. Finding no physical evidence of a being that, should he exist, would have no physical presence means nothing. Finding no physical evidence of a physical object has more significance. Your conversion of a horned horse into a magical beast that nobody could see even if it was standing in front of him is interesting, but only serves to prove the distance you have to go to make that analogy.
I actually made no statement of faith, if you read carefully.
It is, if you follow the reasoning behind the words. You are elevating god to a very special position...
Sorry, but no. I pointed out that atheism is a belief system that requires faith just as much as theism is. I am not the one who created the concept of the being you cannot believe in because you cannot understand him.
Every time an atheist says "if God existed he would..."
That's a straw man.
No, sir, that is the very heart of the matter. "I cannot understand this, therefore it cannot exist." That is a statement of faith in one's own ability to sense the universe and understand it based on incomplete information. When you consider the recorded history of mankind, you'd realize that "cannot understand" is a very poor way to determine what does and does not exist. To make a statement that something that couldn't be observed if it did exist does not exist because it hasn't been observed is a statement of faith.
No, not really. Saying "there is no God" is as much as a statement of faith as saying "there are no unicorns",
Not true. Unicorns are physical creatures, or would be were they to exist. God, however, is not. His existence (were he to exist) is outside the physical universe as we can determine it. I.e., if unicorns exist, you could see them. If God exists, you cannot. It is an order of magnitude different to claim there is no physical object called "unicorn" compared to claiming there is no unobservable object called "God."
Same with unicorns. I've never seen them, you've never seen them, but neither of us can prove they don't exist. I'd say however the likelihood is so low that they do exist that going with "they don't exist" is entirely reasonable. Same for god(s).
As I've just explained, not it is not the same with God. Or Gods.
Now, if the "not stamp collector" were to deny the existence of stamps, you'd have a good analogy.
Not really. Not doing something is not the same as actively doing the negative of something.
Yes, that was exactly my point. "Not stamp collecting" is not the same as "believing there is no God". One is inaction, the other an action. One admits the existence of the object referred to, the other denies it.
The act of believing is being equated to the act of collecting, because I'm making a point about the act.
Exactly. The act of believing there is no God because he is "irrational" and thus cannot exist would be analogous to not collecting stamps because they are "irrational" and cannot exist. This is why the analogy fails. Nobody claims that stamps don't exist no matter how uninteresting they find the hobby of collecting them to be.
Given that is makes no sense to me.... To me, belief in god is irrational.
Your basis for your disbelief, that the existence of God would be "irrational", is akin to claiming that anything you don't understand doesn't exist. This is certainly not true. For centuries man did not understand the simple virus and yet they certainly did suffer from the "common cold" or worse.
However your arguments seem designed to try to justify your act of faith by painting it philosophically as the same as not having faith in some way.
Not at all. It is just as much an act of faith to say "there is no God" as to say there is. Both beliefs cannot be proven by any scientific method. Both beliefs are faith-based. Atheism is based on faith in man's intellect and if his intellect cannot find it rational then God cannot exist. It is a faith in the human mind being able to comprehend the universe and saying what it does not contain. Every time an atheist says "if God existed he would..." he is basing that statement on his own understanding of what he thinks God would do were he to think like humans. Faith in man's superior intellect is still faith.
I actually made no statement of faith, if you read carefully. I simply pointed out the fact that atheism is a faith just as much as any theistic belief. You say you won't change my mind, and indeed, you have not, because I am not here to argue whether God exists or not -- and therefore your arguments that he does not are relevant only in that they prove my point.
Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Not quite. Saying "there is no God" is just as much a religion as saying there is. It is a statement of faith concerning things unseen.
Now, if the "not stamp collector" were to deny the existence of stamps, you'd have a good analogy. But people who do not collect stamps rarely deny their existence, they only see no purpose in collecting them. Someone who admits there is a God but sees no purpose in "collecting" Him is not an atheist -- by definition.
Add in the safety factor that a heavy aircraft is better lifting off further down the runway so that the following departures and arrivals of lighter aircraft are less likely to encounter wake turbulence. As a small plane jockey, you always want to take off or land before the point the previous heavy aircraft took off, or after the point the previous heavy aircraft landed.
It can be in the UK. E.g. drive down a residential road (30 limit) at 4pm on a sunny afternoon at 30 and you may be prosecuted for dangerous driving.
I assume you are trying to describe a condition when there are a lot of other cars on the same narrow, hedge-lined road, with maybe pedestrians walking there, too? Then the real speed limit is not the posted max of 30, it's below that, because of the conditions. And, as a driver, you are supposed to know that at part of driving law.
Yes, you can get a ticket in the US for "too fast for conditions", which is why I went into detail.
If the speed limit is the "suggested maximum safe speed",
I don't believe I said that.
then don't ticket people.
Why not?
It's ridiculous for some places to ticket you for going 5 over the "speed limit" and other places allow you to go over by 20 mph at certain times of the day without getting a ticket.
You've never noticed that conditions in different places are different at different times? Most times, people who are going 20 over without getting a ticket are doing so because they aren't seen doing it. When they are getting away with it, it's because EVERYONE is going 20 over and there is no special hazard being created by that one. It's when they are the only one going 20 over and passing and changing lanes that they get noticed and get a ticket. (Except where there are traps specifically to make money, of course.)
It leaves too much discretion in the cop's hands where they can selectively pull over the people they want and ignore other people equally breaking the "law"
I can tell you, you want cops to have that discretion. It's what allows them to issue warnings instead of tickets when they think it is appropriate. And it's what allows them to let the traffic flow at a natural rate instead of creating a hard cut-off and traffic jams.
No, this is ridiculous. Here is a video showing how ridiculous it is:
Sorry, no player to watch 'tubes'. But it isn't ridiculous, it's a fact. People know that there is a buffer above the posted limit where they are unlikely to be stopped, so they go that fast. Raise the limit, they'll just go faster. You can see that effect on any road where the speed limit changes. They go a bit over when it's posted at 45, they'll speed up to go a bit over when it changes to 55.
The article lists some red flags that should have been raised (two addresses listed as being active, the IRS getting W2 forms from two employers that weren't even near each other, etc).
1. I moved during the tax year.
2. I telecommute to one job in another state, work a second job here.
3. I work two jobs locally, but one (or both) is at a branch site of a national company with headquarters in another state.
There are all kinds of valid reasons to get W2s from employers who aren't near each other. If the IRS had to spend time tracking all of those valid cases down, they'd not have enough time to do anything else. So yes...
Red flags mean that someone has to put in extra effort to resolve the issue.
And having a warning system that has consistent false positives is a bad thing, because it wastes time tracking down the false positives and hides the true ones. It's like the silly way a C compiler will see one error in the first line of a file, report that, and then continue to spew errors about everything that follows that is a result of that first error. "Wow, that program must be really buggy." "No, they just misspelled 'include' in line two."
Your statement contains two orthogonal concepts. Yes, in most states the left lane IS the passing lane, and passing on the right is illegal. (Every state I've driven in it is that way.) This is born out by the number of states where the right lane is "slower" or "<SL" or however the chart you referenced marks it. If there are a number of cars slower in the right lane, driving in the left is perfectly legal and appropriate.
Whether you can also drive normally in the left lane is a different matter. It would be silly to try to claim that you cannot drive in the left lane, because that would impede merging traffic. At least in Oregon, despite how we drive here, we really are supposed to assist the merging traffic to merge safely, not try to push them off into the ditch.
It is never illegal to go the speed limit. But you need to understand that those big signs that say "MAX SPEED" really do mean "max", and that the law for speed also includes road and driving conditions. You can be on a road with a sign that says "55 MPH" and if it is covered in black ice you can get a ticket for going 55 MPH, and almost certainly will get one if you get in an accident while doing it.
or worse saying you must break one law by speeding to not violate a different law of impeding traffic
Well, good thing the laws don't say that. If going the appropriate speed for conditions that does not exceed the posted maximum causes traffic to back up, well, that's life. Going well below the appropriate speed for conditions and impeding traffic, not so much.
If everyone is breaking the speed limit then they either need to pull the entire highway over or raise the limit.
No, they could do what they do now and let traffic flow at a natural rate and only act against those who are causing problems. I.e., the guy who is going 10 MPH faster than everyone else, or the one going slow enough to cause a hazard. Here's a good general rule that my Pappy taught me when he taught me how to drive: pass as many people as are passing you.
If they raise the posted limit, then everyone will just go 10 over the new posted limit. The assumption is that the posted limit is the safe design limit for the road, and since everyone is a better than average driver everyone can go a bit faster.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
You don't ticket the hypothetical 10,000 people that you can't identify and can't pull over, but you might ticket the one you have pulled over who is going too slow.
But you probably don't ticket him unless it is a serious hazard and he is a jerk about it.
I'd also question your "in most cases". Perhaps in many cases. If you're the only one on the road, go for it. But if there's other people and you are causing a backup, you're going too slow.
I expect that the person who came up with "==" for equality didn't think it would be an issue.
Equivalnce is rare and stand-alone, unlike equality comparison,
I don't know what you mean by "stand alone". All of these operators are part of programs. IIRC, the introductory texts for Python put a great deal of emphasis on figuring out if your variables are stored in the same memory location, since IIRC Python does that a lot.
it would be in a storage declaration,
How do you test for "equivalence" between two things if they haven't been defined yet?
as triple equal would be in an expression.
So you would not allow a "triple equal" conditional expression? "If these two things are stored in the same memory location do this..." would be illegal?
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It has the potential to alter the entire face of the planet - every. single. living. thing.
And here's a demonstration of the fear-mongering sky-is-falling anti-GMO attitude.
But instead, humans set it upon the Earth for nothing more than oral pleasure.
Yes, I suppose you could call being able to feed the growing number of people on a planet that isn't getting bigger "oral pleasure", but when you put it that way you only make yourself look arrogant, ignorant, and sociopathic.
This is FARM RAISED SALMON. If you are that picky about your salmon you aren't going to buy artificially grown salmon anyway, you're going to stick with fresh caught.
Second, we eat DNA and RNA EVERY DAY. From all kinds of things. We DIGEST DNA and RNA. Stomach acid does a pretty good job of denaturing things like that. You aren't going to start growing gills just because you ate some fish DNA. Your cells aren't going to suck in the RNA and start turning you into the Jolly Green Giant with scales.
Third, "There are multiple physical barriers to prevent AquAdvantage fish or their eggs from slipping out through these farms' plumbing systems." (I'd provide a link to that quote, but it's already linked to in the summary and if you didn't read it there I doubt you're going to read it now.)
Fourth, even if some do escape, "it would not matter because the AquAdvantage Salmon are reproductively sterile." You know what sterile means, don't you? If YOU are, it means even if you ever do find a girlfriend you couldn't get her pregnant. Same for the fish. They cannot reproduce in the wild. If 1000 do ever manage the "Great Escape" by having Hiltz and Willie dig a tunnel out, that will be 1000 fish out an entire ocean that MIGHT get caught and poison you. But only you, because this RNA was designed specifically to kill you and only you.
Having the FDA force the company to put a warning label on this product only feeds the kind of ignorant fear that you have shown here. Even people who don't really care will see a warning label and wonder if there isn't something wrong if there needs to be a warning label on it. They see warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol that threaten all kinds of bad things for using those products, and they hear "you can die if you take this drug" on drug ads. They will buy cigs and drugs because they are addicted or need the medicinal effects (of the latter), but they won't buy the fish. Why should they? There's a warning that it is bad for them, and right next to it in the grocer's freezer is a box of fish with no warning. And yet, people like you can prove nothing wrong or dangerous about the product. You can only spout heaps of ignorant hyperbole about it effecting the whole planet.
Now, California has done a lot to help desensitize the public to government-mandated warning labels, what with their "known to the State of California" cancer labels on just about everything, so the chilling effect on sales will be lessened a bit, but only a bit.
Think about it, if I offered you two candy bars and one had a government warning label about the dangers of consuming it, and the other did not (and they were the same candy bar, differing only in the labelling) which one would YOU take?
Universities need a way to determine whether or not the accused should be punished for violating the student code of conduct (just like they would, say, for plagiarism violations or academic cheating).
The difference is that plagiarism or cheating are University-based offenses that involve the university directly. Rape is a criminal act covered by local, state, and federal laws, but has no direct connection to the University. No, someone living in a dorm doesn't make everything they do a University problem, and someone living off-campus (in a frat or sorority, or just an apartment) even less so. At least, it shouldn't. And not when there are police and courts all set up to deal with this.
As for this app, it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Someone (male or female, by the way) reports a rape but doesn't realize the "keep it a secret until later" function is active. He wonders why nobody does anything. Then a dozen years later he sues because the University didn't do enough.
The day I walked into my doctor's office, he had a treatment plan. First, try topicals - starting with the least invasive and most likely to succeed. If no response, ...
Good for him. But how did he know there was no response unless he LISTENED TO YOU? You do realize, I hope, that for many, if not most, medical issues the blood test numbers and CAT scan results don't tell the whole story. (Like the ACE inhibitor I was on that gave great blood results but had a side effect that could become permanent had it continued.)
And what if there was a complete resolution of your initial medical issue but you were having side effects that impacted your quality of life? He's not supposed to listen to you talk about that, he's supposed to say "if this other drug was right for you I would have prescribed it for you." That's what you want your doctor to say.
The entire time, he knew more about my condition and the available treatments than I could have possibly picked up from commercials or magazine ads.
Of course. You seem to think that the only source of information for people is television ads. That's just ridiculous. Ads are just one source. You want them stopped so that source is gone. Why? Because you want your doctor to tell you what to do and not have to face questions from his patients about other possible treatments. That's also ridiculous.
Of course he was receptive to hear how I was feeling and reacting to the medication, but he didn't need to know about treatment options.
He needed to LISTEN TO YOU, which is what I said. About more than just your symptoms. Apparently he did, but you stick to your guns and think that a system where doctors dismiss patient questions with a curt "I know better" attitude is the right way to do medicine. That's just, well, ridiculous.
And if your patient comes in and says "How about Orencia? I saw a commercial for it yesterday" and you say anything other than "I would have put you on it already if I thought it was right for you", then you shouldn't be practicing.
No, if that is what your doctor tells you, find a good doctor that includes you in the process of managing your health. Arrogance like that does not belong in the exam room. If your patient is asking you about using a different drug then there is obviously something less than optimal about the drug he's on.
At WORST, the doctor should say that it isn't appropriate, if it isn't, or ask why the patient is asking if it is. The current drug isn't necessarily the best one just because that's the one the doctor was most familiar with when you got your prescription.
Perhaps what you don't understand is that there is often half a dozen different drugs that can manage some problem equally well, and the one that is used will depend on patient tolerance, availability, cost, and doctor education. As I posted elsewhere, there were multiple options for one of the drugs I was taking. An arrogant doctor would say "I would have put you on a different one if I thought it was right for you" when I told him it wasn't right for me. A good doctor LISTENED and realized his first choice wasn't the best. I've been to both kinds, and I know why a good listener is better than an arrogant autocrat.
Um, no. Let's start out with what the hell do you know about the ->PRESCRIPTION- drug being advertised?
You mean after I go online and look up the prescribing information, the mechanism of action, the contraindications and potential side effects? Why nothing at all. No, it is impossible for anyone who isn't a doctor to find out this stuff.
Are you just going to google it, and see what Dr. Oz says about it?
Why would I care what an idiot who has nothing to do with me or my life says about it? I've watched about ten minutes of that fellow's TV show and it was easy to determine that he was a hypocrite who is in it for the money. As I recall, it was two segments back to back where one said carbs are good, the next was carbs are bad. Both were simplistic nonsense.
I mean, really, what do you know about any prescription drugs, other than what you're taking...
Quite a bit, thank you.
. and most people have no clue at all, other than "I take some kinda red pill for sump'n".
So what? So they bring up drug X with their doctor and he tells them it either isn't appropriate or that it is. They don't just run out and buy a buttload of it and start popping it like candy. I mean, there are a lot more ads of other kinds that ought to be banned if you are concerned that some of the people who watch them are too stupid to use the products being sold properly. You know, you can choke to death on a whopper if you don't eat it right, and if you can't swim then going out in a boat can be deadly. And if you are a klutz and you buy a knife from one of those infomercials that sell 300 knives for $10, you could DIE! Ban that infomercial because of stupid people?
And the ads don't tell you anything (right, you actually read all of that 1pt type, and understand it all).
A lot of the ads tell you quite a bit, and even if they don't tell you everything there's this wonderful new invention called "the interwebs" where you can go look stuff up. For example, there are two new drugs for type II diabetes which act by inhibiting glucose re-uptake in the kidneys. The ads are actually pretty clear about what they do, and hypoglycemia is clearly stated as a potential side effect. The web has more on them, but you'd never be able to google for them because you wouldn't guess their names.
It's not free speech, it's garbage.
Oh, please. It saves a lot of people a lot of time having to scour the web for everything that might be new and gives them a name to go look up. It's very much harder to find out about a new drug if you don't even know its name.
And until the mid/late nineties, it was banned.
And then we stopped treating the people like morons and doctors like Gods and removed the ban. If you haven't noticed, there are lots of things that used to be done a certain way that we don't do that way anymore. The fact it was banned is irrelevant; the fact the ban went away is a bit more.
How has such advertising helped you, personally?
It has let me know the existence of specific new drugs that I can go research and consider suggesting to my doctor as replacements for current prescriptions, without me having to spend countless hours repeatedly looking online to see what might have popped up in the last month. It's a "push notification", like the AOL "you've got mail" announcement that relieves people from the task of looking at their mailbox every ten minutes to see if anything new has come in.
There's an ad I saw just last night for a new drug that could be a replacement for one I'm taking now. From information in the ad itself I am pretty sure that it isn't appropriate, but I want to know its mechanism of action so I can see if there might be something else in the pipeline that is appropriate. I had never heard of it before, and my doctor
I did say "about treatment", not "about symptoms".
And I did say a lot about other things than just symptoms. Like the treatment being used.
You can listen to all the symptoms and come up with the perfect drug to use in the perfect amount, but if you don't listen to the patient telling you that he cannot manage to follow the strict protocols that drug requires, or cannot afford it, or has other limitations, or is experiencing side effects, you're a pathetic excuse for a doctor and should not be practicing.
I've found that WebMD is a good resource to find out what to "ask your doctor" about.
What do you ask WebMD about? And do you have to go wander about WebMD every three days, every week, every month, to find out the new stuff? Sounds a lot more ineffective than having a pointer pop up on the telly bringing something new to your attention so that you can THEN go to WebMD and wade through their website looking for data.
Personally, I've found WebMD very unfriendly for simple information.
He's not against NASCAR.
Of course not. He just wants it to change into something completely different. "I just want NASCAR to adapt to the new mainstream." It's called "stock car" for a reason.
Why the hell would you even ask your doctor if he's already prescribing something else for you?
Because you might feel that a different drug will have a different impact on your life. For whatever reason. It's your life, shouldn't you have input into the decision?
It's like an ordinary user of Windows making suggestions as to how to administer a Linux server.
Nope. It's like the owner of a linux server making suggestions to the admin on what software he wants installed.
The doctor is not the one in charge of your health. You are.
And the ad budget for that crap raises the price of the drug above and beyond what the execs "need" for their annual bonus.
You realize that the purpose of advertising is to increase sales, and that if any company (pharma, car, soft drink, anything) doesn't get the money they put into advertising back through sales then they don't advertise.
In order for direct advertisements to work, doctors must be listening to their patients about treatment instead of the other way around. That sounds like a dysfunctional system to me.
You've got to be kidding, right? A doctor that doesn't listen to the patient is a functional system?
I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. A doctor that doesn't listen to the patient will not hear that the patient is having a life threatening side effect from the drug the doctor's told him to take. He won't hear about just inconveniencing side effects. He won't hear about difficulties the patient is having following the course of treatment. He won't hear any of the concerns the patient has.
A doctor that isn't listening is a quack and a pill-pusher and needs to be removed from practice, not held up as an example of functional medicine.
Is it reasonable to expect ill people to make rational decisions?
If they are unconscious, no. If they are conscious and alert, of course. Why would having diabetes or a UTI make someone incapable of making a rational decision?
And let's not pretend anyone is unaffected by ads, like it or not you are affected.
Yes, of course. There are existing checks and balances on the system, however, so you can be "affected" by ads and not wind up being a user.
If my doctor doesn't already know whether X is right for me, then I need to get a new doctor.
Hardly.
For many things, the doctor knows about you only what you've told him. He prescribes drugs that can have side-effects that he doesn't know you are having unless you are aware of them and tell him.
We found out I was allergic to ACE inhibitors only because I mentioned that I was having a slight cough. It wasn't significant enough to me to bring up as an issue, and he saw my blood work come back with good numbers. Until that moment, he thought X was right for me. Then we went to Y.
On the opposite hand, the doctor can know that X is right for you medically, but you may have other considerations that make Y the correct course. If the doctor only said "take X" and you didn't know about Y, you'd not know that Y was better overall.
I've always thought that this was incredibly irresponsible to be promoting the idea that the average slob off the street
At the point you are diagnosed with disease Y you are no longer an "average slob off the street", you are someone who has a vested interest in treating disease Y. You don't need 10 years of post-secondary education to be able to look through potential treatments and read the documentation. You need the 10 years so you can understand all the interactions of the systems and potential seriousness of side effects and interactions.
"end users, ask your sysadmin if systemd is right for you."
Analogy fail. The system administrator is the person responsible for administering the system the end users use. The PATIENT is the person ultimately responsible for the health of the patient.
In other words, doctors would have to pay for an expensive subscription to look at ads.
No, of course not. They're expected to live near enough to a library that has a subscription and take an hour or two out of their schedule every few days to run over to peruse the journals for interesting stuff.
Just like Joe Sixpack is supposed to, and if the library is good they'll also have a medical dictionary to translate the big words into stuff the layman can understand.
It's the most productive use of everyone's time, after all.
Medical journals cover the extent to which doctors actually need to be informed about this stuff.
Doctors already work a lot talking to patients, and are expected to be current on everything. When do they find time to read journals on the off chance they might find a reference to a new drug that they can use?
And when, exactly, is the general public supposed to read those medical journals to see if there is a development that might be beneficial to them? You don't really believe that the doctor is supposed to be the sole source of medical information for patients, and has sole responsibility for keeping them informed of developments, do you?
For example, my MD made a comment a year or so ago about a new type of drug that can help keep blood sugar levels down. It wasn't ready yet. He hasn't had to waste his time talking with me about it because I saw it advertised (gasp!) and was able to gather the information by myself. And just last night, an ad (gasp!) let me know there is another drug that might be relevant which I can now go look up.
You see, it is not just his job to manage my health, it is mine, and I have should have the information in a form I can use to do that. That means that an ad that tells me there is something new to study up on is much better than having to find the time to read through medical journals every week looking for references.
Yeah, I get sick and tired of the "Cialis for ED" soft-porn ads, but not every ad is targeted at or useful to everyone. I also get sick and tired of the Bear Grylls "explosion of pus in my mouth" ad on BBC America, and ads for hamsters driving Kias, but that's life.
How does he hold his hammer if he's not physical?
Thank you for proving my point better than I could ever do. Your faith in your logical reasoning about God is shining through with every word. Faith. God cannot exist because I don't understand how he could hold a hammer, and I have ultimate faith in my ability to understand.
Let's go back 200 years and ask this: how could we hear a man's voice if he were not in the room speaking to us? Let's go back 20 years: how can we put five hours of music recording into something that is smaller than one of Aunt Martha's compacts? How can a man walk on the moon when there is no air? Clearly such ideas are irrational and impossible.
It is as much an act of faith so claim god in all probability doesn't exist based on the evidence as it is to say that in all likelihood unicorns don't exist based on the evidence.
I've covered that error already. Finding no physical evidence of a being that, should he exist, would have no physical presence means nothing. Finding no physical evidence of a physical object has more significance. Your conversion of a horned horse into a magical beast that nobody could see even if it was standing in front of him is interesting, but only serves to prove the distance you have to go to make that analogy.
I actually made no statement of faith, if you read carefully.
It is, if you follow the reasoning behind the words. You are elevating god to a very special position ...
Sorry, but no. I pointed out that atheism is a belief system that requires faith just as much as theism is. I am not the one who created the concept of the being you cannot believe in because you cannot understand him.
Every time an atheist says "if God existed he would ..."
That's a straw man.
No, sir, that is the very heart of the matter. "I cannot understand this, therefore it cannot exist." That is a statement of faith in one's own ability to sense the universe and understand it based on incomplete information. When you consider the recorded history of mankind, you'd realize that "cannot understand" is a very poor way to determine what does and does not exist. To make a statement that something that couldn't be observed if it did exist does not exist because it hasn't been observed is a statement of faith.
No, not really. Saying "there is no God" is as much as a statement of faith as saying "there are no unicorns",
Not true. Unicorns are physical creatures, or would be were they to exist. God, however, is not. His existence (were he to exist) is outside the physical universe as we can determine it. I.e., if unicorns exist, you could see them. If God exists, you cannot. It is an order of magnitude different to claim there is no physical object called "unicorn" compared to claiming there is no unobservable object called "God."
Same with unicorns. I've never seen them, you've never seen them, but neither of us can prove they don't exist. I'd say however the likelihood is so low that they do exist that going with "they don't exist" is entirely reasonable. Same for god(s).
As I've just explained, not it is not the same with God. Or Gods.
Now, if the "not stamp collector" were to deny the existence of stamps, you'd have a good analogy.
Not really. Not doing something is not the same as actively doing the negative of something.
Yes, that was exactly my point. "Not stamp collecting" is not the same as "believing there is no God". One is inaction, the other an action. One admits the existence of the object referred to, the other denies it.
The act of believing is being equated to the act of collecting, because I'm making a point about the act.
Exactly. The act of believing there is no God because he is "irrational" and thus cannot exist would be analogous to not collecting stamps because they are "irrational" and cannot exist. This is why the analogy fails. Nobody claims that stamps don't exist no matter how uninteresting they find the hobby of collecting them to be.
Given that is makes no sense to me .... To me, belief in god is irrational.
Your basis for your disbelief, that the existence of God would be "irrational", is akin to claiming that anything you don't understand doesn't exist. This is certainly not true. For centuries man did not understand the simple virus and yet they certainly did suffer from the "common cold" or worse.
However your arguments seem designed to try to justify your act of faith by painting it philosophically as the same as not having faith in some way.
Not at all. It is just as much an act of faith to say "there is no God" as to say there is. Both beliefs cannot be proven by any scientific method. Both beliefs are faith-based. Atheism is based on faith in man's intellect and if his intellect cannot find it rational then God cannot exist. It is a faith in the human mind being able to comprehend the universe and saying what it does not contain. Every time an atheist says "if God existed he would ..." he is basing that statement on his own understanding of what he thinks God would do were he to think like humans. Faith in man's superior intellect is still faith.
I actually made no statement of faith, if you read carefully. I simply pointed out the fact that atheism is a faith just as much as any theistic belief. You say you won't change my mind, and indeed, you have not, because I am not here to argue whether God exists or not -- and therefore your arguments that he does not are relevant only in that they prove my point.
Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Not quite. Saying "there is no God" is just as much a religion as saying there is. It is a statement of faith concerning things unseen.
Now, if the "not stamp collector" were to deny the existence of stamps, you'd have a good analogy. But people who do not collect stamps rarely deny their existence, they only see no purpose in collecting them. Someone who admits there is a God but sees no purpose in "collecting" Him is not an atheist -- by definition.
Add in the safety factor that a heavy aircraft is better lifting off further down the runway so that the following departures and arrivals of lighter aircraft are less likely to encounter wake turbulence. As a small plane jockey, you always want to take off or land before the point the previous heavy aircraft took off, or after the point the previous heavy aircraft landed.
It can be in the UK. E.g. drive down a residential road (30 limit) at 4pm on a sunny afternoon at 30 and you may be prosecuted for dangerous driving.
I assume you are trying to describe a condition when there are a lot of other cars on the same narrow, hedge-lined road, with maybe pedestrians walking there, too? Then the real speed limit is not the posted max of 30, it's below that, because of the conditions. And, as a driver, you are supposed to know that at part of driving law.
Yes, you can get a ticket in the US for "too fast for conditions", which is why I went into detail.
If the speed limit is the "suggested maximum safe speed",
I don't believe I said that.
then don't ticket people.
Why not?
It's ridiculous for some places to ticket you for going 5 over the "speed limit" and other places allow you to go over by 20 mph at certain times of the day without getting a ticket.
You've never noticed that conditions in different places are different at different times? Most times, people who are going 20 over without getting a ticket are doing so because they aren't seen doing it. When they are getting away with it, it's because EVERYONE is going 20 over and there is no special hazard being created by that one. It's when they are the only one going 20 over and passing and changing lanes that they get noticed and get a ticket. (Except where there are traps specifically to make money, of course.)
It leaves too much discretion in the cop's hands where they can selectively pull over the people they want and ignore other people equally breaking the "law"
I can tell you, you want cops to have that discretion. It's what allows them to issue warnings instead of tickets when they think it is appropriate. And it's what allows them to let the traffic flow at a natural rate instead of creating a hard cut-off and traffic jams.
No, this is ridiculous. Here is a video showing how ridiculous it is:
Sorry, no player to watch 'tubes'. But it isn't ridiculous, it's a fact. People know that there is a buffer above the posted limit where they are unlikely to be stopped, so they go that fast. Raise the limit, they'll just go faster. You can see that effect on any road where the speed limit changes. They go a bit over when it's posted at 45, they'll speed up to go a bit over when it changes to 55.
The article lists some red flags that should have been raised (two addresses listed as being active, the IRS getting W2 forms from two employers that weren't even near each other, etc).
1. I moved during the tax year.
2. I telecommute to one job in another state, work a second job here.
3. I work two jobs locally, but one (or both) is at a branch site of a national company with headquarters in another state.
There are all kinds of valid reasons to get W2s from employers who aren't near each other. If the IRS had to spend time tracking all of those valid cases down, they'd not have enough time to do anything else. So yes ...
Red flags mean that someone has to put in extra effort to resolve the issue.
And having a warning system that has consistent false positives is a bad thing, because it wastes time tracking down the false positives and hides the true ones. It's like the silly way a C compiler will see one error in the first line of a file, report that, and then continue to spew errors about everything that follows that is a result of that first error. "Wow, that program must be really buggy." "No, they just misspelled 'include' in line two."
In many states, the left lane is not a passing lane, but a driving lane. http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right....
Your statement contains two orthogonal concepts. Yes, in most states the left lane IS the passing lane, and passing on the right is illegal. (Every state I've driven in it is that way.) This is born out by the number of states where the right lane is "slower" or "<SL" or however the chart you referenced marks it. If there are a number of cars slower in the right lane, driving in the left is perfectly legal and appropriate.
Whether you can also drive normally in the left lane is a different matter. It would be silly to try to claim that you cannot drive in the left lane, because that would impede merging traffic. At least in Oregon, despite how we drive here, we really are supposed to assist the merging traffic to merge safely, not try to push them off into the ditch.
Saying that it's illegal to go the speed limit
It is never illegal to go the speed limit. But you need to understand that those big signs that say "MAX SPEED" really do mean "max", and that the law for speed also includes road and driving conditions. You can be on a road with a sign that says "55 MPH" and if it is covered in black ice you can get a ticket for going 55 MPH, and almost certainly will get one if you get in an accident while doing it.
or worse saying you must break one law by speeding to not violate a different law of impeding traffic
Well, good thing the laws don't say that. If going the appropriate speed for conditions that does not exceed the posted maximum causes traffic to back up, well, that's life. Going well below the appropriate speed for conditions and impeding traffic, not so much.
If everyone is breaking the speed limit then they either need to pull the entire highway over or raise the limit.
No, they could do what they do now and let traffic flow at a natural rate and only act against those who are causing problems. I.e., the guy who is going 10 MPH faster than everyone else, or the one going slow enough to cause a hazard. Here's a good general rule that my Pappy taught me when he taught me how to drive: pass as many people as are passing you.
If they raise the posted limit, then everyone will just go 10 over the new posted limit. The assumption is that the posted limit is the safe design limit for the road, and since everyone is a better than average driver everyone can go a bit faster.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
You don't ticket the hypothetical 10,000 people that you can't identify and can't pull over, but you might ticket the one you have pulled over who is going too slow.
But you probably don't ticket him unless it is a serious hazard and he is a jerk about it.
I'd also question your "in most cases". Perhaps in many cases. If you're the only one on the road, go for it. But if there's other people and you are causing a backup, you're going too slow.
I didn't expect that to be an issue.
I expect that the person who came up with "==" for equality didn't think it would be an issue.
Equivalnce is rare and stand-alone, unlike equality comparison,
I don't know what you mean by "stand alone". All of these operators are part of programs. IIRC, the introductory texts for Python put a great deal of emphasis on figuring out if your variables are stored in the same memory location, since IIRC Python does that a lot.
it would be in a storage declaration,
How do you test for "equivalence" between two things if they haven't been defined yet?
as triple equal would be in an expression.
So you would not allow a "triple equal" conditional expression? "If these two things are stored in the same memory location do this..." would be illegal?