A DNA sample can also be used to identify the race of a person.
You sure about that? I have some kids with African, European, and American ancestry and I'd love you to tell me what their "race" is, with or without a DNA sample.
If you are trying to use "race" to predict how medication might affect a person, you will probably be disappointed. Sure, you can ask people to self-identify and see patterns emerge from the "black" and "white" and "Asian or Pacific Islander" categories... but at the end of the day, as a physician, when a black guy walks into your office you can't give him any kind of certainty as to what his specific reaction might be. So race is useless in this context.
If you are trying to use "race" to categorize people in the same way that you would categorize birds by plumage or ants by mandible size, then yeah, it's pretty useful for that.
You could have at least done a man search for "gnu":
$ man -k gnu bash GNU Bourne-Again SHell bignum, math::bignum(n) Arbitrary precision integer numbers diffpp pretty-print diff outputs with GNU enscript emacs GNU project Emacs gnurmt, rmt remote magtape protocol module gnuserv, gnuclient Server and Clients for Emacs groff a short reference for the GNU roff language groff_diff differences between GNU troff and classical troff nanorc GNU nano's rcfile perlgpl the GNU General Public License, version 1 perlgpl the GNU General Public License, version 2 tar The GNU version of the tar archiving utility
I know Apple in dominant in this space, but it's amazing to me that we don't have any serious competition in the $1000-2000 laptop space. College campus bookstores now offer a crap Dell machine for the budget-conscious, and then all of the other offerings are MacBooks of some flavor. At work we buy 100% Lenovo. When someone flops a MacBook Pro down on the conference table, the contrast is just amazing. And I actually like the ThinkPads, but they look like they are from a totally different generation.
I think it would be great if someone seriously entered this space. Vizio is trying it out - I wish them well.
Dell sold just under 12 million computers - they go as cheap as $300 or so. Apple sold just over 5 million computers (Macs - not iPhones or iPads or iPods), and they start at $700. Seems to me Dell would do better to just drop the cheap crap and raise their margins. I think their pursuit of marketshare above all else is hurting them. If Apple can sell 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all, then why can't Dell?
You may very well have good points, but I've already said that I support making the vaccines free as part of any legislation making them mandatory.
In my state (PA), each county has a health department. In mine, you call your local clinic, make an appointment, and go get your free shots. If the local clinic is not working out for you (weird hours, etc), there are also community clinics that aren't free, but are very low-cost. Without doing too much research, I see that there is a clinic in my county that will do immunizations for $15 a pop.
I have no idea what it's like to be on Medicaid, and I'm sure it sucks. I don't want to minimize what poor people have to go through. That said, there is charity care available. It probably shouldn't be made too great, or other people would take advantage of it without really needing it. You have to balance people's genuine need for charity with people's innate ability to leach the system. It's a very difficult problem.
I'm just saying that it does not matter to me whether they make me vaccinate my kids with my own money, or whether they take my money and then give me the vaccinations for "free". Either way, I'm out xx dollars for a vaccination.
It's a mix, and I suspect it depends on your state.
For instance, if I bring my kids to the doctor and the doctor gives the shot, it looks like they bill my insurance company. If I take the kids to a clinic, they get it for "free". I put free in quotes because obviously they take my money forcibly through taxes, then roll it around in a federal bureaucracy, reducing the value of the money, and then buy vaccine with it.
Anyway, another example is that my county sometimes provides free flu shots. Once (with swine flu), I had to drive an hour all the way across the county to get the free shot because the doctor didn't have it. Usually I get it free through work, or stop in to Walgreens for $12 or whatever it costs.
But we got a bit off-topic. I have no problem providing "free" vaccine as part of whatever law that gets passed mandating the vaccines.
Lets take the flu vaccine, which is not even really in contention here because the flu is generally so mild - people are mostly worked up about MMR and such. But let's use the flu.
If your kid had a reaction to the vaccine, which does happen, he'd be in a clinical situation and probably would not die. Last year in the US the flu hospitalized over 40,000 and killed over 2,000. That's a miniscule hospitalization rate (based on our 300 million population, which is probably flawed because not everyone got the flu) of only about 0.01%, and a death rate of only 0.0007%. Tiny, but at least there are numbers. I'd love to compare flu vaccine deaths, but there weren't any.
Our doctor has told us, directly and point blank, had we done so he would be dead.
I think I need to have a word with your doctor. It's quite a claim, that your kid would have been the only infant that year to die from a flu vaccine.
Anyway, your child is exactly who I was talking about when I said we should exempt for allergies, though I was not referring to the flu shot, which I think is not such an important disease that we need to have a mandatory vaccine every single year. I'm talking about the MMR, DTap, Chicken Pox, Polio, Rotavirus, and maybe Hep A. The others: Flu, Hep B, and Pneumonia... well, you'd have to be an idiot not to use them, but at least you probably aren't affecting everyone else.
This should not be your decision. It's not fair to expose other children to your vaccinated child and it's not fair to sequester your child. The only remaining option is to just force your hand, unless I'm missing something. Parents are not the end-all arbiter. We take kids away from parents all the time.
It's also completely unnecessary so long as you can inoculate the rest of the population. The beauty of vaccination is that you don't have to get everyone to wipe out a disease - but you do have to get the vast majority.
Of course, you mentioned eggs, so you are probably talking about the flu vaccine, which is seasonal. So yeah, you have a good point that it may be worth coming up with alternative production methods - though they'd probably cost Mr. Egg Allergy a small fortune.
Some people have allergic reactions to the vaccines themselves. You can let those people remain un-vaccinated and herd immunity will still work. I think you typically need about 90% vaccination rate to stop a disease.
Patents don't really apply to many vaccines, since the rules are different. Merck pretty much has a forever monopoly on MMR, for instance. But Merck is only in the vaccine business because of pressure by the government - so pathetic are the profits. The reason is that the government is by far the largest buyer of vaccines, so they can exert a lot of pricing pressure. I think the government pays under $20 for the same MMR that costs the market over $40.
So it's your contention that vaccines are a conspiracy among the data centers, insurers, utility companies, data analysts, and researchers?
I'll grant you that the global market has made newer vaccines more profitable than they were in the past, but vaccines still have very low profit margins. In fact, I doubt there is any profit at all on the older vaccines that we are arguing over here.
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A DNA sample can also be used to identify the race of a person.
You sure about that? I have some kids with African, European, and American ancestry and I'd love you to tell me what their "race" is, with or without a DNA sample.
Uh, oh... now we have to define "useful" :)
If you are trying to use "race" to predict how medication might affect a person, you will probably be disappointed. Sure, you can ask people to self-identify and see patterns emerge from the "black" and "white" and "Asian or Pacific Islander" categories... but at the end of the day, as a physician, when a black guy walks into your office you can't give him any kind of certainty as to what his specific reaction might be. So race is useless in this context.
If you are trying to use "race" to categorize people in the same way that you would categorize birds by plumage or ants by mandible size, then yeah, it's pretty useful for that.
On Earth, where kids walk around with $600 phone toys in their pocket.
Mac is certified, official Unix. (from your opengroup link)
You could have at least done a man search for "gnu":
$ man -k gnu
bash GNU Bourne-Again SHell
bignum, math::bignum(n) Arbitrary precision integer numbers
diffpp pretty-print diff outputs with GNU enscript
emacs GNU project Emacs
gnurmt, rmt remote magtape protocol module
gnuserv, gnuclient Server and Clients for Emacs
groff a short reference for the GNU roff language
groff_diff differences between GNU troff and classical troff
nanorc GNU nano's rcfile
perlgpl the GNU General Public License, version 1
perlgpl the GNU General Public License, version 2
tar The GNU version of the tar archiving utility
I know Apple in dominant in this space, but it's amazing to me that we don't have any serious competition in the $1000-2000 laptop space. College campus bookstores now offer a crap Dell machine for the budget-conscious, and then all of the other offerings are MacBooks of some flavor. At work we buy 100% Lenovo. When someone flops a MacBook Pro down on the conference table, the contrast is just amazing. And I actually like the ThinkPads, but they look like they are from a totally different generation.
I think it would be great if someone seriously entered this space. Vizio is trying it out - I wish them well.
Dell sold just under 12 million computers - they go as cheap as $300 or so. Apple sold just over 5 million computers (Macs - not iPhones or iPads or iPods), and they start at $700. Seems to me Dell would do better to just drop the cheap crap and raise their margins. I think their pursuit of marketshare above all else is hurting them. If Apple can sell 5 million expensive computers with no low-end offering at all, then why can't Dell?
You may very well have good points, but I've already said that I support making the vaccines free as part of any legislation making them mandatory.
In my state (PA), each county has a health department. In mine, you call your local clinic, make an appointment, and go get your free shots. If the local clinic is not working out for you (weird hours, etc), there are also community clinics that aren't free, but are very low-cost. Without doing too much research, I see that there is a clinic in my county that will do immunizations for $15 a pop.
I have no idea what it's like to be on Medicaid, and I'm sure it sucks. I don't want to minimize what poor people have to go through. That said, there is charity care available. It probably shouldn't be made too great, or other people would take advantage of it without really needing it. You have to balance people's genuine need for charity with people's innate ability to leach the system. It's a very difficult problem.
I'll repeat myself:
But the scenario you described wouldn't even happen today, because poor people are covered with Medicaid.
I'm just saying that it does not matter to me whether they make me vaccinate my kids with my own money, or whether they take my money and then give me the vaccinations for "free". Either way, I'm out xx dollars for a vaccination.
It's so not-profitable that the government has to pull on Merck to keep making them.
It's a mix, and I suspect it depends on your state.
For instance, if I bring my kids to the doctor and the doctor gives the shot, it looks like they bill my insurance company. If I take the kids to a clinic, they get it for "free". I put free in quotes because obviously they take my money forcibly through taxes, then roll it around in a federal bureaucracy, reducing the value of the money, and then buy vaccine with it.
Anyway, another example is that my county sometimes provides free flu shots. Once (with swine flu), I had to drive an hour all the way across the county to get the free shot because the doctor didn't have it. Usually I get it free through work, or stop in to Walgreens for $12 or whatever it costs.
But we got a bit off-topic. I have no problem providing "free" vaccine as part of whatever law that gets passed mandating the vaccines.
They do give out the vaccines for free. The US government buys up something like 2/3 of Merck's MMR, for instance.
Hyberbole?
Lets take the flu vaccine, which is not even really in contention here because the flu is generally so mild - people are mostly worked up about MMR and such. But let's use the flu.
If your kid had a reaction to the vaccine, which does happen, he'd be in a clinical situation and probably would not die. Last year in the US the flu hospitalized over 40,000 and killed over 2,000. That's a miniscule hospitalization rate (based on our 300 million population, which is probably flawed because not everyone got the flu) of only about 0.01%, and a death rate of only 0.0007%. Tiny, but at least there are numbers. I'd love to compare flu vaccine deaths, but there weren't any.
Our doctor has told us, directly and point blank, had we done so he would be dead.
I think I need to have a word with your doctor. It's quite a claim, that your kid would have been the only infant that year to die from a flu vaccine.
Anyway, your child is exactly who I was talking about when I said we should exempt for allergies, though I was not referring to the flu shot, which I think is not such an important disease that we need to have a mandatory vaccine every single year. I'm talking about the MMR, DTap, Chicken Pox, Polio, Rotavirus, and maybe Hep A. The others: Flu, Hep B, and Pneumonia... well, you'd have to be an idiot not to use them, but at least you probably aren't affecting everyone else.
This should not be your decision. It's not fair to expose other children to your vaccinated child and it's not fair to sequester your child. The only remaining option is to just force your hand, unless I'm missing something. Parents are not the end-all arbiter. We take kids away from parents all the time.
It's also completely unnecessary so long as you can inoculate the rest of the population. The beauty of vaccination is that you don't have to get everyone to wipe out a disease - but you do have to get the vast majority.
Of course, you mentioned eggs, so you are probably talking about the flu vaccine, which is seasonal. So yeah, you have a good point that it may be worth coming up with alternative production methods - though they'd probably cost Mr. Egg Allergy a small fortune.
PayPal charges their fees on the transaction side rather than on the withdrawal side.
It's not good profit if there are more profitable things to do with your money.
And it's so common that the example that immediately popped into your brain happened 40 years ago.
It's supposed to be monopolistic and anti-competitive. That's the whole point.
because they are more likely to see them as a fashion statement than a tool.
My ringtone is "Call Me, Maybe".
How do we KNOW you are standing?
Some people have allergic reactions to the vaccines themselves. You can let those people remain un-vaccinated and herd immunity will still work. I think you typically need about 90% vaccination rate to stop a disease.
I'm grateful for your more thoughtful response.
Patents don't really apply to many vaccines, since the rules are different. Merck pretty much has a forever monopoly on MMR, for instance. But Merck is only in the vaccine business because of pressure by the government - so pathetic are the profits. The reason is that the government is by far the largest buyer of vaccines, so they can exert a lot of pricing pressure. I think the government pays under $20 for the same MMR that costs the market over $40.
You could have just said "woosh"... :)
So it's your contention that vaccines are a conspiracy among the data centers, insurers, utility companies, data analysts, and researchers?
I'll grant you that the global market has made newer vaccines more profitable than they were in the past, but vaccines still have very low profit margins. In fact, I doubt there is any profit at all on the older vaccines that we are arguing over here.