approximately 280,000 miles of driving and a lifetime of 12.5 years.
So which comes first, the 280,000 miles or the 12.5 years?
Different on different instances of the car. But it doesn't matter.
The batteries have more than one mode of ageing. One is driven mainly by time-since-manufacture, others by cycling. So after you drive it for 280,000 miles in, say, eight years OR park it for 12.5 years on a trickle charger, don't expect the car to work well any more (or the manufacturer's warranty to still be in force).
I take issue with your "Not useful in Florida" title.
Sure, in Florida (at normal temperatures) the battery/controller would go straight to charging (and the normal cooling fans or whatever would kick in once it got hot enough). So it would work just fine, though it wouldn't use the "heat me up first" feature.
Until some winter when you drive up to Michigan, Quebeck, Alaska, or the nearest ski mountain or place where your kids can make snowballs, park it overnight at a motel or resort (because all the charging stations are full), then charge it in the morning while you eat breakfast. Oops! THEN you'll want the feature to be installed.
(It's really low weight, so hauling around a extra power transistor and some nickel foil heating elements doesn't cut into your mileage.)
So even if you don't actually use it in Florida it's still useful there - to the dealer selling you the car. B-)
If you are trying to argue it's slavery because it forces doctors to charge certain prices, well, then they are already slaves because they can only charge what's been agreed upon with insurance companies.
IF they chose to accept a particular insurance company's special arrangements. (Many didn't, would charge what they chose, and any insured of the unaffiliated companies would be liable for the difference between what the medic charged and the company paid, if they chose to be treated by that doctor.)
With even the half-hearted system of Obamacare, a large fraction of doctors chose to abandon their current patients and either retire or join large clinic operations capable of handling the red tape.
All single payer does is eliminate the unnecessary middleman that is insurance companies.
By replacing it with a government monopoly middleman, eliminating all competition and consumer choice, operating with the usual incompetence, corruption, and conflicted motives of any government program.
Insurance companies can quit the medical insurance business or sign up to be the government middlemen, owned and funded by the original owners / stockholders but completely controlled by the government.
Look up the definition of the economic system of fascisim.
This is probably the most interesting 'News for Nerds' in the past month - yet almost no comments, and those posted are attempting to be funny.
Where did Slashdot go?
Tell me about it. B-b
Unfortunately, those afflicted with the left-wing meme set - a descendant of Stalinism - have gone into a full-court press on social pressure, in every venu where they can rant.
That leaves the non-afflicted among us (along with those afflicted with competing memes) with a choice between:
* letting the SJWs rant unopposed (and use Slashdot as yet another indoctrination tool) or
* replying to them (providing a sanity check and moral support for those not yet inducted into their religion, at the cost of continuing each digression and inflating its volume).
Some of us think that opposing tyranny is worth standing up and being counted, even if it dilutes our beloved forum's information content.
Even with fetal stem cells, it's still worth it. Abortions will happen, legal or not. Might as well derive some use from them. This being said, the goal is to grow lungs from a patient's OWN stem cells -- removes the risk of rejection.
Hear hear.
Fortunately all around: Foetal stem cells, even when not rejected, tend to cause cancers when transplanted into an adult. (They get confused about what they should be doing.) Meanwhile, pluripotent stem cells from the patient (with pluripotency induced or just the right cells found) are really good at figuring out and doing the right thing if given a few chemical hints. Print the right growth factors into the right spots in the scaffold and/or spit the right cells into various places, and they just work together to build what should be the final organ. Immune compatibility comes with the package. (Even if the patient has autoimmune issues, starting with his own tissue may require fewer compensating adjustments than staring with a stock cell culture.)
Foetal stem cells were important for research into the mechanisms of differentiation, growth, and repair. They are a lot farther back in the process than anything you can harvest from someone who has been grown to term and born, so you don't have to guess about how the early stages worked. Once the mechanisms are figured out, though, using a patient's own cells (or a compatible line derived from a voluntary donor), poking them into the right stage and branch of development, seems to have advantages beyond avoiding offence to common moral codes.
So...life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? If "pursuit of happiness" can be extrapolated to cover property...
Actually (according to an historian of my acquaintance) the original buzzphrase, used heavily in the political debates of the time, was "Life, liberty, and property.". When he wrote the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson changed the last to "pursuit of happiness" to broaden it (while still including "property"). Acquiring stuff, and keeping others from taking it away or fooling with it, is part of pursuing happiness.
So you don't need to extrapolate "pursuit of happiness" to include "property". But you DO need to extrapolate to warp "life" to include "medical care at others' expense to extend life".
That's especially true since it's at odds with both "liberty" (enslaving doctors by forcing them to provide services on the government's terms) and the "property" component of "pursuit of happiness" (stealing/taxing/borrowing-with-promise-to-tax-to-pay-back money to buy medical goods and services, price-limiting medical supplies, etc.).
Reminds me of the very early text adventure game that was released for the TRS-80 back in the early days.. It was just the classic text "Adventure" with the description strings replaced, to change from exploring "colossal cave" to exploring an Egyptian pyramid.
For instance: In place of the delicate ming vase and the pillow, you find a miniature mummy that will shatter if you put it back down ("drop it") unless you carry it a little way and find a "mummy case" to put it in.
If you remember the winning moves in Adventure you could run straight through this one as well. Boring...
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Compulsory."
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Unbiased."... the tests are applied to *ALL MALE CITIZENS*. Since this is literally a sample size of "All male citizens of service age in Norway from the start year, to the terminus year", you are talking a very large and unbiased (by ethnicity, race, cultural upbringing, religious practice, affluence level,... etc.) sample. The only demographic excluded is likely to be female gender, which I explicitly lamplit. Unless you want to make a compelling argument that women are intellectually inferior to men (*gigglesnort*) in the face of a wide number of well reviewed studies to the contrary of that assertion, there is no grounds to claim systemic bias of the sample.
It's systematically biased by sex. It's systematically biased by country of citizenship - which means by race, ethnicity, CHANGES in ethnicity due to immigration, residence, educational system, language, media exposure, diet, political events, disease exposure, environmental stresses (weather, pollution,...), healthcare system, and I could go on.
Generalizing from data collected on all draft-age Norwegian males to the state of the entire human race is one of the the kinds of misstep that cause "real scientists" to look down their noses at research work done in the "soft sciences". Did the authors actually make this "all of us" claim, or is it hype hung on their results by the media (or their institution's media relations group)?
For example when is the IQ test conducted? Before they are conscripted into service of before that as an evaluation of their abilities? Because you need to keep in mind that while service is compulsory in theory, in practice they do not conscript even half of the people they test.
So if they do well on the test they get drafted into the military? Perhaps a better headline would be:
"Norwegian draft-age Males Are Getting Better at Faking Stupidity on Preinduction Intelligence Tests, Says Science."
US has EZ-Pass, which is a defacto tracking system, even if not originally designed as such.
But at least with EZ-Pass you can opt out (at some inconvenience when you travel). You can't opt out of having a radio-linked tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) on any new car purchased in 2008 or later.
TPMSes work by having, in each tire's valve stem, a pressure sensor with a radio transmitter and a battery (good for 7 years, after which the system nags you until you replace the senders), which periodically transmits its unique identification number and the tire pressure reading. This can be received by roadside devices with directional antennas and/or under-road loops, and the sensor I.D.(s) used to identify the car.
It is trivial to collect the information to make the connection between TPMS I.D.s and vehicle owners by pointing a license-plate reading camera at an in-lane TPMS receiver loop, associating the license plate with any wheel squawks sent while the car is over the loop, and then adding that to a database of license plate vs. owner and insured additional drivers. (This even keeps it up to date when the transmitter batteries eventually run down and the transmitters are replaced.)
An ongoing record of which TPMS squawks are detected where and when gives a location record for each wheel, and thus the vehicle, along with its driver and any passengers.
So, thanks to the TREAD act, every new car sold in the US over the last ten years came equipped with four tracking transmitters. China is just catching up.
In other news: The oldest humans on the planet are dying, or having parts of their bodies fail, MUCH more often than even those a few years younger.
(According to the Social Security administration's Period Life Table for 2015, the probability of death within a year for a person 119 years old is 90%, while at 107 years it's only 50%. Research papers and tables compiled by other insurance operations give similar numbers.)
Baobab tree trunks are not a single stem growing from the roots, but a cluster of them, of varying ages. This looks like a strategy for achieving long life for the overall organism without having to achieve long life for all of its parts: Just grow additional trunk stems. When the older ones get feeble and die off, the younger ones are still there and take over. (Of course sometimes you end up with a lot of old ones, and losing most of them all at once is the end of the show.)
This is not to say that the deaths observed here are NOT caused, in whole or great part, by climate change or some other stress in recent years. But the study seems to be just a recent look, with nothing in the past to compare it to. So while it indicates that, recently, the oldest individuals and oldest chunks of them died off more than the younger instances, it does nothing to distinguish whether this is the normal condition of the trees vs. the result of something recent.
The "Lying to the FBI" (or other lying to cops) charge is one of the several reasons you Never Talk to Police.
See the above video for a law professor's lecture on many more.
Instead you ALWAYS exercise your Fifth Amendment privilege to remain silent. ESPECIALLY if you're innocent. ANYTHING you tell them "can and will be used against you".
Even if it's true, somebody else may have told them something conflicting - through error or malice - and the police and prosecutors may then decide you're lying. Bingo: Both a criminal charge and the burden of proof switches from them proving you're guilty to you proving you're innocent.
This is because energy demands rose faster than deployment of renewable energy sources to supply them, and fossil fuel energy is still cheap.
I expect renewable energy generation to catch up with demand growth and start makng it shrink again. And the driving force for the changeover, of course, will be price: Economy of scale and technological advancement will reduce the price of renewable generation, attracting first new loads, then equipment replacement loads, and possibly eventually changeover of existing facilities. Meanwhile, cost of fossil fuel extraction gradually rises as the cheaper-to-get portions get used up and less-cheap-to-get portions become worth chasing.
I also expect both deployment of renewable generation and load switchover to be gradual. There is an ENORMOUS amount of infrastructure involved, and no percentage in all of it changing at once. (In fact, price signals would push back against sudden changeovers.)
Now that doesn't mean you won't get a market panic sometime in the next SEVENTEEN YEARS, as the article moots. Crowds CAN be driven mad from time to time. (Especially by articles like this. B-) )
But while I don't claim to be any better than the authors of the study at predicting the markets for a generation ahead, I don't see any reason why the currently-visible fundamentals of the markets and the typical vicissitudes of tech deployment should be expected to produce such a sudden crash.
In some cases, they've developed vaccines that cause the immune system to target specific mutations. I've seen before and after photos of an amazing recovery. The problem is that a few months later, the cancer came back, and the patient soon died.
As I understand it:
The (or a) problem with vaccine-initiated attacks on cancers is that there are cell-surface markers that tell the immune system: "I'm really a cell type that starts producing a surface protein AFTER the immune system is deployed - or maybe a placental cell in a new baby. Don't kill me!" Normally these are only expressed by things like the cells forming myelin sheaths (to keep EVERYBODY from getting Multiple Sclerosis - like symptoms while still a toddler). But wIth a lot of cells in a tumor living beyond the hayflick limit and accumulating mutations, some of them t;urn one one of these markers. The vaccine-induced immune cells knock back the tumors, time out, and when the tumors start to grow back the cells with the markers convince the immune system not to attack any more.
The trick discovered a few years back is to clone the immune cells OUTSIDE the body, where they don't see that signal, until they're past the point of paying attention to it, then injecting a massive army of such cells. The tumor cells say "I'm OK, don't kill me!" The soldiers say "ORLY?" and kill them anyway.
There have been several attempts at this: They worked fine at killing the tumors. But injecting a big army of immune cells kills enough cancer tissue at once that the fallout inflammatory chemicals tended to kill the patient with something akin to toxic shock syndrome. Recently the medical community tried doing this and then keeping the patient in the hospital and giving them treatments for the toxic shock until the tumors were knocked back far enough that the patient was past the crisis. With a little tuning they got to a regime where THAT worked nicely.
So now they're doing variants against more cancer types - starting, of course, with metastatic, previously incurable (especially in late stages), types that hit a lot of people. Bingo: An advanced breast cancer cure, based on the approach, also succeeds.
Expect this to be the start of a flood of similar treatments for a range of cancers, as they work their way down the list, while tuning and generalizing the procedures.
New medical treatments have a lot of hurdles to jump through to be approved by governments, insurance companies, etc. It may be years before we know if this one will work for a significant percentage of cancer patients, to run the clinical trials and get it approved, whether it's worth mass-producing parts of it to reduce the cost of administering it, etc. Yes, it may be quite some time before it's available to most of us.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Of course it came out of the Trump administration. So a bunch of lefties think it must therefore be bad (and are already telling stories claiming that). Also: A lot of Democratic politicians voted against it (perhaps out of a desire to hamper the Trump administration no matter how many lives it costs, because they think the idiots in government legislatures and agencies are better able to make medical decisions than those they perceive as morons who happen to be sick, or because one way to avoid bankrupting Social Security and similar programs is to get retirees to die off.)
It will be interesting to see the cognitive dissonance among Democrat supporters who need a not yet approved medical treatment.
Meanwhile: A lot of primaries are tomorrow, and a general election in another few months. If you, a family member, or a friend is ill with a life-threatening condition for which there are no treatments deployed but some under development, you might want to check your Senator and/or Representative's voting record on the Right to Try act before you cast your vote.
I just don't understand how you can have spam calls like that and be ok with it. Is it an american thing?
1a: People sued the spammers in civil courts for various damages and started winning.
1b; Some states passed anti-phone-spam laws, some of which made it easier to sue and win defined amounts for defined misbehavior. Ramp up 1a.
2: Telemarketers lobbied congress to get these suits off their backs and out of their business models.
3: Congress responded with the can-spam act. It purported to regulate, and criminalize some classes of, telemarketing spam nationally (while protecting others - such as political campaign calls. polls, charities, and businesses who could claim a relationship with the calle), block even those to cell phones (which, at the time, typically charged high by-the-minute rates even on incoming calls), and create a national do-not-call list that the telemarketers had to respect.
But it also preempted state laws and civil suits. You had to appeal to the feds for enforcement. 4: State level prosecutions and civil suits stopped. 5: People appealed to the feds for enforcement. 6: 7: Telemarketers figured this out and ramped up their calls. 8: PROFIT! 9: Telemarketers started ignoring the do-not-call list with impunity. 10: MORE PROFIT! 11: Telemarketers figured out how to spoof caller ID and number blocking. 12: STILL MORE PROFIT! 13: Technology was developed to make the process cheaper to run:
13a: Boiler-room call-victim-first, call-phone-pimp-if-he-answers, drop-call-if-they're-all-busy systems.
13b: Improving tech to distinguish pickup from voicemail or failed call and keep the victim on the line: answer timing, phone SIT tone detection on call failures, voice recognition of "hello" and its analogs, canned prompts to hold interest, computer generated voice asking for the victim by name.
13c: Full-bore scripted or AI cyber-phone-pimps. (Why pay humans to staff a boiler room when you can buy software and computers for far less?) 14: PROFIT, PROFIT, PROFIT! 15: Customers tried to get the phone companies to do something to mitigate the problem, or disconnect the phone-spammers. 16: 17: Academic estimates how much the phone carriers earn per year delivering phone spam: (If I recall correctly: many billions - not quite a trillion - per year.) 18: PROFIT for phone carriers, too. 19: Switching carriers doesn't help because they are required to connect calls from other networks and (with the source spoofed) can't distinguish the spam calls. 20: Customers give up.
So it's not that we're OK with it. We're not. It's just that the Washington swamp rats got bought a few years back and right now we've got no leverage - other than doing our best to throw the rascals out and drain the swamp.
It's pretty much impossible to know what specific number of carriers would magically create the optimal amount of competition.
But as I understand it:
* 1: is obviously a problem. He gets to set his price to extract maximum profit from the customer base - and usually does.
* 2: Market forces encourage the two players to split the customer base evenly and keep the prices high. No collusion required.
* 3: Though the most profitable would be (as always) to split things about evenly and keep the prices up, things are starting to get unstable. Without collusion the equilibrium may hold. or the smallest guy may get too squeezed and have to try to gain market share by cutting costs or improving service.
* 4: By this point keeping things balanced without collusion becomes very difficult. Without organized cooperation the smallest player tends to get squeezed to the point that he must try to buy customers, starting the price-war breakdown that drives the prices toward cost-of-service-plus-modest-profit.
and it becomes more unstable from there. Three is iffy, four is where things USUALLY flip into real competition.
As the OP in question, I'd like to correct your misunderstanding.
The OP favors a polyculture of interacting individuals - but with the nonaggression principle as the core law for their interaction, recognizing property as "crystalized labor" (to quote the epiphany of a left-wing labor union leader of my acquaintance), and with groups having no more rights than those of the individuals of which they consist.
"Corporatism" is yet another set of socialist schemes, and quite outside the above acceptable set.
(Or are you using the left-wing swear word definition of "corporatism", which amounts to plutocracy? That's not within the set, either.)
Unfortunately, the current left-wing, though its members mostly don't realize it, is a fanatic religion, with anything related to a useful business practice labelled as sin, and the practitioners of business labelled as sinners. So any educational institution whose members adhere to this religion will necessarily be teaching counter-productive lessons to its students.
The catch is that you can only apply to one of three schools.
Oh, you mean so:
- They go to schools that the company know do a good job of teaching the skills they company needs for a decent price.
- They don't go to one of the scam "school" operations that rip you off for big bucks and don't teach you squat.
- They don't go to an accredited school that teaches left-wing politics, socialist "economics" theories, and that business (especially Walmart) is the enemy - rather than something you need to do and do well if you want to get ahead in one.
Sounds to me, as well that;
- This is NOT a serfdom scam (like some tech companies that send you to boot camp and then charge you for it if you quit within a rather long time.0
- The skills and certs are likely to be useful for seeking jobs - and at higher levels - at other companies both in the same industry (which is where their people are likely to work even if they DO go to another company) and in business in general.
- Their training their people with skills suitable for higher ranking, and higher paid, positions in their own company. To get that to pay off (beyond job satsifaction and retention) they'd have to be promoting from within, rather than hiring middle-to-upper management from without while leaving the rank-and-file stuck in a dead-end job.
Slashdot Mirror
Different on different instances of the car. But it doesn't matter.
The batteries have more than one mode of ageing. One is driven mainly by time-since-manufacture, others by cycling. So after you drive it for 280,000 miles in, say, eight years OR park it for 12.5 years on a trickle charger, don't expect the car to work well any more (or the manufacturer's warranty to still be in force).
I take issue with your "Not useful in Florida" title.
Sure, in Florida (at normal temperatures) the battery/controller would go straight to charging (and the normal cooling fans or whatever would kick in once it got hot enough). So it would work just fine, though it wouldn't use the "heat me up first" feature.
Until some winter when you drive up to Michigan, Quebeck, Alaska, or the nearest ski mountain or place where your kids can make snowballs, park it overnight at a motel or resort (because all the charging stations are full), then charge it in the morning while you eat breakfast. Oops! THEN you'll want the feature to be installed.
(It's really low weight, so hauling around a extra power transistor and some nickel foil heating elements doesn't cut into your mileage.)
So even if you don't actually use it in Florida it's still useful there - to the dealer selling you the car. B-)
If you are trying to argue it's slavery because it forces doctors to charge certain prices, well, then they are already slaves because they can only charge what's been agreed upon with insurance companies.
IF they chose to accept a particular insurance company's special arrangements. (Many didn't, would charge what they chose, and any insured of the unaffiliated companies would be liable for the difference between what the medic charged and the company paid, if they chose to be treated by that doctor.)
With even the half-hearted system of Obamacare, a large fraction of doctors chose to abandon their current patients and either retire or join large clinic operations capable of handling the red tape.
All single payer does is eliminate the unnecessary middleman that is insurance companies.
By replacing it with a government monopoly middleman, eliminating all competition and consumer choice, operating with the usual incompetence, corruption, and conflicted motives of any government program.
Insurance companies can quit the medical insurance business or sign up to be the government middlemen, owned and funded by the original owners / stockholders but completely controlled by the government.
Look up the definition of the economic system of fascisim.
chutzpah is a gentoo developer wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Chutzpah
And that spells bias to you?
To me it looks more like "an inside source".
(But I agree that chutzpah's article should have mentioned his connection with gentoo.)
This is probably the most interesting 'News for Nerds' in the past month - yet almost no comments, and those posted are attempting to be funny.
Where did Slashdot go?
Tell me about it. B-b
Unfortunately, those afflicted with the left-wing meme set - a descendant of Stalinism - have gone into a full-court press on social pressure, in every venu where they can rant.
That leaves the non-afflicted among us (along with those afflicted with competing memes) with a choice between:
* letting the SJWs rant unopposed (and use Slashdot as yet another indoctrination tool) or
* replying to them (providing a sanity check and moral support for those not yet inducted into their religion, at the cost of continuing each digression and inflating its volume).
Some of us think that opposing tyranny is worth standing up and being counted, even if it dilutes our beloved forum's information content.
Even with fetal stem cells, it's still worth it. Abortions will happen, legal or not. Might as well derive some use from them. This being said, the goal is to grow lungs from a patient's OWN stem cells -- removes the risk of rejection.
Hear hear.
Fortunately all around: Foetal stem cells, even when not rejected, tend to cause cancers when transplanted into an adult. (They get confused about what they should be doing.) Meanwhile, pluripotent stem cells from the patient (with pluripotency induced or just the right cells found) are really good at figuring out and doing the right thing if given a few chemical hints. Print the right growth factors into the right spots in the scaffold and/or spit the right cells into various places, and they just work together to build what should be the final organ. Immune compatibility comes with the package. (Even if the patient has autoimmune issues, starting with his own tissue may require fewer compensating adjustments than staring with a stock cell culture.)
Foetal stem cells were important for research into the mechanisms of differentiation, growth, and repair. They are a lot farther back in the process than anything you can harvest from someone who has been grown to term and born, so you don't have to guess about how the early stages worked. Once the mechanisms are figured out, though, using a patient's own cells (or a compatible line derived from a voluntary donor), poking them into the right stage and branch of development, seems to have advantages beyond avoiding offence to common moral codes.
So...life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? If "pursuit of happiness" can be extrapolated to cover property ...
Actually (according to an historian of my acquaintance) the original buzzphrase, used heavily in the political debates of the time, was "Life, liberty, and property.". When he wrote the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson changed the last to "pursuit of happiness" to broaden it (while still including "property"). Acquiring stuff, and keeping others from taking it away or fooling with it, is part of pursuing happiness.
So you don't need to extrapolate "pursuit of happiness" to include "property". But you DO need to extrapolate to warp "life" to include "medical care at others' expense to extend life".
That's especially true since it's at odds with both "liberty" (enslaving doctors by forcing them to provide services on the government's terms) and the "property" component of "pursuit of happiness" (stealing/taxing/borrowing-with-promise-to-tax-to-pay-back money to buy medical goods and services, price-limiting medical supplies, etc.).
The Lone Star Tick joins a long list of blood-sucking parasites from Texas. Most of the others, however, have been politicians.
However: More of them, at least the politician type, come from California.
Reminds me of the very early text adventure game that was released for the TRS-80 back in the early days.. It was just the classic text "Adventure" with the description strings replaced, to change from exploring "colossal cave" to exploring an Egyptian pyramid.
For instance: In place of the delicate ming vase and the pillow, you find a miniature mummy that will shatter if you put it back down ("drop it") unless you carry it a little way and find a "mummy case" to put it in.
If you remember the winning moves in Adventure you could run straight through this one as well. Boring...
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Compulsory."
I suggest that you review the definition of the word "Unbiased." ... the tests are applied to *ALL MALE CITIZENS*. Since this is literally a sample size of "All male citizens of service age in Norway from the start year, to the terminus year", you are talking a very large and unbiased (by ethnicity, race, cultural upbringing, religious practice, affluence level, ... etc.) sample. The only demographic excluded is likely to be female gender, which I explicitly lamplit. Unless you want to make a compelling argument that women are intellectually inferior to men (*gigglesnort*) in the face of a wide number of well reviewed studies to the contrary of that assertion, there is no grounds to claim systemic bias of the sample.
It's systematically biased by sex. ...), healthcare system, and I could go on.
It's systematically biased by country of citizenship - which means by race, ethnicity, CHANGES in ethnicity due to immigration, residence, educational system, language, media exposure, diet, political events, disease exposure, environmental stresses (weather, pollution,
Generalizing from data collected on all draft-age Norwegian males to the state of the entire human race is one of the the kinds of misstep that cause "real scientists" to look down their noses at research work done in the "soft sciences". Did the authors actually make this "all of us" claim, or is it hype hung on their results by the media (or their institution's media relations group)?
For example when is the IQ test conducted? Before they are conscripted into service of before that as an evaluation of their abilities? Because you need to keep in mind that while service is compulsory in theory, in practice they do not conscript even half of the people they test.
So if they do well on the test they get drafted into the military? Perhaps a better headline would be:
"Norwegian draft-age Males Are Getting Better at Faking Stupidity on Preinduction Intelligence Tests, Says Science."
US has EZ-Pass, which is a defacto tracking system, even if not originally designed as such.
But at least with EZ-Pass you can opt out (at some inconvenience when you travel). You can't opt out of having a radio-linked tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) on any new car purchased in 2008 or later.
TPMSes work by having, in each tire's valve stem, a pressure sensor with a radio transmitter and a battery (good for 7 years, after which the system nags you until you replace the senders), which periodically transmits its unique identification number and the tire pressure reading. This can be received by roadside devices with directional antennas and/or under-road loops, and the sensor I.D.(s) used to identify the car.
It is trivial to collect the information to make the connection between TPMS I.D.s and vehicle owners by pointing a license-plate reading camera at an in-lane TPMS receiver loop, associating the license plate with any wheel squawks sent while the car is over the loop, and then adding that to a database of license plate vs. owner and insured additional drivers. (This even keeps it up to date when the transmitter batteries eventually run down and the transmitters are replaced.)
An ongoing record of which TPMS squawks are detected where and when gives a location record for each wheel, and thus the vehicle, along with its driver and any passengers.
So, thanks to the TREAD act, every new car sold in the US over the last ten years came equipped with four tracking transmitters. China is just catching up.
In other news: The oldest humans on the planet are dying, or having parts of their bodies fail, MUCH more often than even those a few years younger.
(According to the Social Security administration's Period Life Table for 2015, the probability of death within a year for a person 119 years old is 90%, while at 107 years it's only 50%. Research papers and tables compiled by other insurance operations give similar numbers.)
Baobab tree trunks are not a single stem growing from the roots, but a cluster of them, of varying ages. This looks like a strategy for achieving long life for the overall organism without having to achieve long life for all of its parts: Just grow additional trunk stems. When the older ones get feeble and die off, the younger ones are still there and take over. (Of course sometimes you end up with a lot of old ones, and losing most of them all at once is the end of the show.)
This is not to say that the deaths observed here are NOT caused, in whole or great part, by climate change or some other stress in recent years. But the study seems to be just a recent look, with nothing in the past to compare it to. So while it indicates that, recently, the oldest individuals and oldest chunks of them died off more than the younger instances, it does nothing to distinguish whether this is the normal condition of the trees vs. the result of something recent.
The "Lying to the FBI" (or other lying to cops) charge is one of the several reasons you Never Talk to Police.
See the above video for a law professor's lecture on many more.
Instead you ALWAYS exercise your Fifth Amendment privilege to remain silent. ESPECIALLY if you're innocent. ANYTHING you tell them "can and will be used against you".
Even if it's true, somebody else may have told them something conflicting - through error or malice - and the police and prosecutors may then decide you're lying. Bingo: Both a criminal charge and the burden of proof switches from them proving you're guilty to you proving you're innocent.
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, the oil age won't end because we run out of oil.
What a GREAT sound bite. That deserves both an "insightful" and a "funny".
There's been no lack of demand for oil, and it's doubtful that this is going to change any time soon.
In fact (as a later item on the slashdot front page today notes):
The World Set a New Record For Renewable Power in 2017, But Emissions [of oil and gas sourced carbon dioxide] Are Still Rising.
This is because energy demands rose faster than deployment of renewable energy sources to supply them, and fossil fuel energy is still cheap.
I expect renewable energy generation to catch up with demand growth and start makng it shrink again. And the driving force for the changeover, of course, will be price: Economy of scale and technological advancement will reduce the price of renewable generation, attracting first new loads, then equipment replacement loads, and possibly eventually changeover of existing facilities. Meanwhile, cost of fossil fuel extraction gradually rises as the cheaper-to-get portions get used up and less-cheap-to-get portions become worth chasing.
I also expect both deployment of renewable generation and load switchover to be gradual. There is an ENORMOUS amount of infrastructure involved, and no percentage in all of it changing at once. (In fact, price signals would push back against sudden changeovers.)
Now that doesn't mean you won't get a market panic sometime in the next SEVENTEEN YEARS, as the article moots. Crowds CAN be driven mad from time to time. (Especially by articles like this. B-) )
But while I don't claim to be any better than the authors of the study at predicting the markets for a generation ahead, I don't see any reason why the currently-visible fundamentals of the markets and the typical vicissitudes of tech deployment should be expected to produce such a sudden crash.
In some cases, they've developed vaccines that cause the immune system to target specific mutations. I've seen before and after photos of an amazing recovery. The problem is that a few months later, the cancer came back, and the patient soon died.
As I understand it:
The (or a) problem with vaccine-initiated attacks on cancers is that there are cell-surface markers that tell the immune system:
"I'm really a cell type that starts producing a surface protein AFTER the immune system is deployed - or maybe a placental cell in a new baby. Don't kill me!" Normally these are only expressed by things like the cells forming myelin sheaths (to keep EVERYBODY from getting Multiple Sclerosis - like symptoms while still a toddler). But wIth a lot of cells in a tumor living beyond the hayflick limit and accumulating mutations, some of them t;urn one one of these markers. The vaccine-induced immune cells knock back the tumors, time out, and when the tumors start to grow back the cells with the markers convince the immune system not to attack any more.
The trick discovered a few years back is to clone the immune cells OUTSIDE the body, where they don't see that signal, until they're past the point of paying attention to it, then injecting a massive army of such cells. The tumor cells say "I'm OK, don't kill me!" The soldiers say "ORLY?" and kill them anyway.
There have been several attempts at this: They worked fine at killing the tumors. But injecting a big army of immune cells kills enough cancer tissue at once that the fallout inflammatory chemicals tended to kill the patient with something akin to toxic shock syndrome. Recently the medical community tried doing this and then keeping the patient in the hospital and giving them treatments for the toxic shock until the tumors were knocked back far enough that the patient was past the crisis. With a little tuning they got to a regime where THAT worked nicely.
So now they're doing variants against more cancer types - starting, of course, with metastatic, previously incurable (especially in late stages), types that hit a lot of people. Bingo: An advanced breast cancer cure, based on the approach, also succeeds.
Expect this to be the start of a flood of similar treatments for a range of cancers, as they work their way down the list, while tuning and generalizing the procedures.
New medical treatments have a lot of hurdles to jump through to be approved by governments, insurance companies, etc. It may be years before we know if this one will work for a significant percentage of cancer patients, to run the clinical trials and get it approved, whether it's worth mass-producing parts of it to reduce the cost of administering it, etc. Yes, it may be quite some time before it's available to most of us.
Which is why the recently enacted "Right to Try" legislation is so important. It legalizes patients obtaining experimental drugs and treatments that are in clinical trial but still far from approval. Before that, you couldn't get such a treatment (in the US) for any price, and any medical practitioner who sold or gave it to you would be a criminal (and also almost certain to lose their certs to practice medicine).
Of course it came out of the Trump administration. So a bunch of lefties think it must therefore be bad (and are already telling stories claiming that). Also: A lot of Democratic politicians voted against it (perhaps out of a desire to hamper the Trump administration no matter how many lives it costs, because they think the idiots in government legislatures and agencies are better able to make medical decisions than those they perceive as morons who happen to be sick, or because one way to avoid bankrupting Social Security and similar programs is to get retirees to die off.)
It will be interesting to see the cognitive dissonance among Democrat supporters who need a not yet approved medical treatment.
Meanwhile: A lot of primaries are tomorrow, and a general election in another few months. If you, a family member, or a friend is ill with a life-threatening condition for which there are no treatments deployed but some under development, you might want to check your Senator and/or Representative's voting record on the Right to Try act before you cast your vote.
6: and 16: were supposed to be <the sound of crickets> but I forgot to escape the angle brackets.
But a blank line works almost as well, doesn't it? B-)
I just don't understand how you can have spam calls like that and be ok with it. Is it an american thing?
1a: People sued the spammers in civil courts for various damages and started winning.
1b; Some states passed anti-phone-spam laws, some of which made it easier to sue and win defined amounts for defined misbehavior. Ramp up 1a.
2: Telemarketers lobbied congress to get these suits off their backs and out of their business models.
3: Congress responded with the can-spam act. It purported to regulate, and criminalize some classes of, telemarketing spam nationally (while protecting others - such as political campaign calls. polls, charities, and businesses who could claim a relationship with the calle), block even those to cell phones (which, at the time, typically charged high by-the-minute rates even on incoming calls), and create a national do-not-call list that the telemarketers had to respect.
But it also preempted state laws and civil suits. You had to appeal to the feds for enforcement.
4: State level prosecutions and civil suits stopped.
5: People appealed to the feds for enforcement.
6:
7: Telemarketers figured this out and ramped up their calls.
8: PROFIT!
9: Telemarketers started ignoring the do-not-call list with impunity.
10: MORE PROFIT!
11: Telemarketers figured out how to spoof caller ID and number blocking.
12: STILL MORE PROFIT!
13: Technology was developed to make the process cheaper to run:
13a: Boiler-room call-victim-first, call-phone-pimp-if-he-answers, drop-call-if-they're-all-busy systems.
13b: Improving tech to distinguish pickup from voicemail or failed call and keep the victim on the line: answer timing, phone SIT tone detection on call failures, voice recognition of "hello" and its analogs, canned prompts to hold interest, computer generated voice asking for the victim by name.
13c: Full-bore scripted or AI cyber-phone-pimps. (Why pay humans to staff a boiler room when you can buy software and computers for far less?)
14: PROFIT, PROFIT, PROFIT!
15: Customers tried to get the phone companies to do something to mitigate the problem, or disconnect the phone-spammers.
16:
17: Academic estimates how much the phone carriers earn per year delivering phone spam: (If I recall correctly: many billions - not quite a trillion - per year.)
18: PROFIT for phone carriers, too.
19: Switching carriers doesn't help because they are required to connect calls from other networks and (with the source spoofed) can't distinguish the spam calls.
20: Customers give up.
So it's not that we're OK with it. We're not. It's just that the Washington swamp rats got bought a few years back and right now we've got no leverage - other than doing our best to throw the rascals out and drain the swamp.
It's pretty much impossible to know what specific number of carriers would magically create the optimal amount of competition.
But as I understand it:
* 1: is obviously a problem. He gets to set his price to extract maximum profit from the customer base - and usually does.
* 2: Market forces encourage the two players to split the customer base evenly and keep the prices high. No collusion required.
* 3: Though the most profitable would be (as always) to split things about evenly and keep the prices up, things are starting to get unstable. Without collusion the equilibrium may hold. or the smallest guy may get too squeezed and have to try to gain market share by cutting costs or improving service.
* 4: By this point keeping things balanced without collusion becomes very difficult. Without organized cooperation the smallest player tends to get squeezed to the point that he must try to buy customers, starting the price-war breakdown that drives the prices toward cost-of-service-plus-modest-profit.
and it becomes more unstable from there. Three is iffy, four is where things USUALLY flip into real competition.
Ad hominem. I win!
The OP favors a monoculture of corporatism.
As the OP in question, I'd like to correct your misunderstanding.
The OP favors a polyculture of interacting individuals - but with the nonaggression principle as the core law for their interaction, recognizing property as "crystalized labor" (to quote the epiphany of a left-wing labor union leader of my acquaintance), and with groups having no more rights than those of the individuals of which they consist.
"Corporatism" is yet another set of socialist schemes, and quite outside the above acceptable set.
(Or are you using the left-wing swear word definition of "corporatism", which amounts to plutocracy? That's not within the set, either.)
Unfortunately, the current left-wing, though its members mostly don't realize it, is a fanatic religion, with anything related to a useful business practice labelled as sin, and the practitioners of business labelled as sinners. So any educational institution whose members adhere to this religion will necessarily be teaching counter-productive lessons to its students.
The catch is that you can only apply to one of three schools.
Oh, you mean so:
- They go to schools that the company know do a good job of teaching the skills they company needs for a decent price.
- They don't go to one of the scam "school" operations that rip you off for big bucks and don't teach you squat.
- They don't go to an accredited school that teaches left-wing politics, socialist "economics" theories, and that business (especially Walmart) is the enemy - rather than something you need to do and do well if you want to get ahead in one.
Sounds to me, as well that;
- This is NOT a serfdom scam (like some tech companies that send you to boot camp and then charge you for it if you quit within a rather long time.0
- The skills and certs are likely to be useful for seeking jobs - and at higher levels - at other companies both in the same industry (which is where their people are likely to work even if they DO go to another company) and in business in general.
- Their training their people with skills suitable for higher ranking, and higher paid, positions in their own company. To get that to pay off (beyond job satsifaction and retention) they'd have to be promoting from within, rather than hiring middle-to-upper management from without while leaving the rank-and-file stuck in a dead-end job.
Looks like a good deal for all concerned.