Having done time in a "gifted and talented" program in elementary school, I think the best thing the schools can do for top performers is give 'em a library card. Turn 'em loose once they know how to read and work with a card catalog and a search engine. Smart kids don't need to socialize with kids their own age. They need to socialize with the adults they'll eventually become.
Unfortunately they're closing down the libraries. When I grew up in New York, the neighborhood libraries were open 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week. Now, a lot of the libraries have been shut down, and the hours cut back so you can't work in the evenings.
The Internet is a nice addition to the library, but it's a poor substitute.
Critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: ThatÃ(TM)s what we mean when we refer to Ãoethinking like a scientistà or Ãoethinking like a historian.Ã
You are running a driver/firmware update on a product which isn't theirs. Just like with a laptop if you run a BIOS update on the wrong product and it destroys your machine the vendor isn't responsible.
This is more like an admin who quits his job and wipes out the whole system before he goes.
I read a few of the Mercedes auto safety studies. They were always the neatest, best organized papers. Everybody else used trend lines. The Mercedes engineers used probability ellipses.
I saw a report in Automotive News of a presentation by a Mercedes engineer on why they can protect a passenger up to 50 mph, but not above.
He said that the way they protect a passenger in a head-on collision was by having the front end collapse. The front end was about 50 inches long. When the car crashed into a solid barrier at 50 mph, the front end would crush, and it would take 50 inches, at 50 g, to bring the passenger compartment to a stop.
If the car was going faster than 50 mph, it couldn't stop in 50 inches, the engine would go into the passenger compartment, and the passenger compartment would begin to disintegrate.
Since the kinetic energy of the car was KE=mv^2, the KE would increase as the square of the velocity, so the 50-inch front end of the car would also have to increase as the square of the velocity. If the car was going at 70 mph, the front end would have to be 100 inches to stop the car in 100 inches at 50 g. You could make the front end stiffer, but that would make the deceleration higher, and 50 g was about the human limit.
So they designed the car to protect you by absorbing energy and getting squashed. The best accident is one in which the car is totaled and you're safe. That's the way it's supposed to work.
I knew several automotive engineers. Everyone who could afford it bought a Mercedes. Good car.
I can only comment from personal experience. Seat belt wearing rates are very high in Australia (to the point where I don't know ANYONE who doesn't) and I always wear a seat belt.
I lost control of a mini cooper S at approx 80 kph. The car spun, then righted it self before driving off the road directly into a very large tree that didn't move a mm.
Actually, many of the seat belt and auto safety studies I read were from Australia.
I'm glad that you got out of it OK and that you got a good story out of it.
I read many accident reports of collisions like yours, a front-end collision against a solid barrier at 80 kph (60 mph), where the occupants were wearing seat belts, and they survived -- before the days of air bags.
The classic study was by Nils Bohlin for Volvo. He found that nobody died in an accident up to 60 mph if they were wearing the three-pont lap and shoulder belt. As long as the passenger compartment remained intact, they survived. A car can hit a tree head-on, the engine compartment will crush like an accordion, but the passenger compartment will remain intact up to about 60 mph. Above 60 mph, the engine and transmission shell will go into the passenger compartment, the passenger compartment will collapse, and the survival declines significantly. That's consistent with your experience.
Nils I. Bohlin, (1967). "A Statistical Analysis of 28,000 Accidents with Emphasis on Occupant Restraint Value,". 11th Stapp Car Crash Conference. Society of Automotive Engineers. doi:10.4271/670925. SAE Technical Paper 670925. http://papers.sae.org/670925/
Airbags are for your head, seat belts are for your torso. If you enjoy slamming your head into your steering wheel, go ahead and disable your airbag. Even more fun are videos of an asymmetric head-on collision that favors one side over the other. The test dummies slam their heads into the frame of the car unless you have properly working forward and side airbags.
I used to work for an engineering society during the 1970s, and I read dozens of seat belt design papers and talked to engineers who designed them.
Those lap and shoulder belts were successfully designed so that in a collision up to at least 60 mph, the driver wouldn't hit the steering wheel, windshield, or windshield frame. These were collisions at about 60 degrees right and left, and with 2 cars offset by several feet. They proved it with computer models, crash tests and real-world studies.
It is true that lap and shoulder belts didn't provide as much protection against a side collision, but neither did airbags. Fortunately, those collisions were not as common. If another car hit the driver's seat head-on and perpendicularly, nobody had a practical way to save the driver. The side bags came after I left, and I'd like to see the studies.
A lot of the auto magazines of the time took the position that air bags added no significant safety, if you were wearing your seat belt. The only reason for requiring them was that we had a low seat belt wearing rate (and we still do).
In engineering terms, it seemed like a shame to spend $500 for complicated, falliable, single-use airbags, just because people refused to use $50 seat belts. But that's the way humans are, and you have to design for them.
I'd feel comfortable driving in a car with a well-designed seat belt and no airbags.
Auto manufacturers are required to report potential safety-related defects to the federal government. That information is a public record, so they have to put it on *.gov. That's easier than filling freedom of information act requests.
You should be able to go to kia.com, etc. but when you're dealing with life-threatening defects, it's a good practice to have a backup.
And as we know from the medical industry, it's a matter of judgment as to when you have enough reported defects to make a statistically significant decision that a hazard indeed exists. Manufacturers and government regulators often differ.
Google quickly populates with accurate results, but those accurate results will be mixed in with inaccurate results.
Some people have found that government sites are relatively accurate, compared to the other sources, or at least more accountable.
The reason the government is in the business of car recalls is that we left it to the auto companies in the past and they failed.
We already make it illegal for foreigners to take out ads to support one side in an election. The Saudis or the Chinese can't contribute money to a political action committee.
Is that censorship? Is that acceptable to you?
Or do you want foreign governments -- say, Russia -- to be able to contribute money to our election campaigns, and not have to disclose it?
Right now rich foreigners are buying $100-million pied-a-terre penthouse apartments in Manhattan, and $100 million artworks at Southeby's. Would you like them to start collecting Congressmen too?
Right now it costs about $1 billion to run for president, and that money comes almost entirely from corporate interests and ideologically interested billionaires. It turns out that you can buy elections by spending enough money.
So a handful of billionaires and wealthy interest groups are taking over the government and running the country.
Is that a problem for you? Or do you think that's the way it should be?
I read about new medical research all day. It's my job. I just went to a conference last week on new medical technology. I talk to corporate executives about how they're financing their business. I talk to scientists about where their money is coming from. So I know a little bit about who invests money in new research, what they invest in, and what they don't.
Nobody in the industry or in academic medical research believes that private investment could fund the kind of research the NIH does. And I talk to the people in private industry who are looking to invest money. Bill Gates only "investing" in these companies as a charity, not because the investors will make a profit.
I also meet people who believe that the government can't do anything, and we should leave everything to private industry.
They're ideologues. They believe what they want to believe and they can't be changed by facts. The latest research by psychologists found that the more strongly the facts show that they're wrong, the more strongly they believe in their wrong ideas. They're like those doomsday cults that predicted the end of the world, and then, when the world didn't end, they just went on believing.
So I realize that you believe the government is wasting money on NIH research, no facts will convince you otherwise, and it's a waste of time trying.
I thought you had maybe a glimmer of willingness to consider ideas outside your preconceived beliefs. But now I see you don't.
I read the Case Records in the New England Journal of Medicine, and when they describe a case, they usually or always tell whether the person had traveled outside the U.S. Although this is at a referral hospital where they get the tough cases.
First, what the fuck does Howie Katz know about NIH grants? If he knew anything, he'd know how to cite the grant so that somebody else could look it up and find out whether it was true. I checked NIH database and couldn't find it.
Second, the condoms he's talking about, as far as I can figure out, had funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and the Small Business Administration.
Third, the most common way AIDS is transmitted in this country is through anal intercourse, and this condom seems to be designed for the purpose of presenting that. The cost of treating AIDS over a patient's lifetime is about $500,000, which is usually paid by Medicaid or Medicare, and a lot of them go on disability, so anything that reduces the spread of AIDS is going to pay back the cost of development several times over.
Any stupid right-wing blogger can get a list of NIH grants, post it on his web site and say, "Look at how stupid they are," but in fact every grant has to give good reasons why this is a good use of government money, and the wingnuts leave that part out.
There is currently no effective test to tell whether a person's presenting symptoms are from ebola or from the flu.
The simple effective test to tell whether somebody may have Ebola is to ask them, "Have you been outside the U.S. recently?" If they've been to West Africa, then you can worry about Ebola.
Our healthcare system is economically screwed up beyond comprehension, and Obamacare did absolutely nothing to adjust economic and outcome decisions for the better, just piled on more incentive to perform more needless and expensive testing.
For all his flaws, Obama did give a recess appointment to Donald Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick's demonstrated expertise was to adjust economic and outcome decisions for the better. He would have made decisions based on cost/benefit calculations like the UK NICE system. He managed a nationwide program that reduced hospital infections and saved lives, so he actually can deliver.
Unfortunately Berwick's appointment was sabotaged by the Republicans, who refused to confirm him, so her resigned.
That's called 20/20 hindsight, Mr. Armchair Surgeon General. Had you been there, with a patient with the symptoms of some viral infection, I'd have liked to see you saying "of course it's Ebola!", when in reality, there are dozens of alternative diagnoses, many of them much more likely.
I sure as hell would have asked, "Have you traveled outside the U.S. recently?"
Another Golden Fleece awards was for the study of activities in a Peruvian brothel, the significance of which should be obvious to anyone who heard of AIDS. (Come to think of it, I probably have to spell it out for you: Doctors have to know what sexual activities people participate in,
And to do that they have to spend US dollars studying brothels in Peru. Right. You're stretching things quite a distance here. Peruvian brothels are such a considerable source of the AIDS epidemic, right?
As a matter of fact, there were cases of AIDS coming into the US from Peru, but that's not the point. We had a new viral disease that nobody had ever seen before, it was killing 5,000 Americans a year before they had developed drugs for it, and doctors had very few ways to deal with it. One of the few things they could do is prevention, by discouraging people from engaging in the activities that spread AIDS. But they didn't know what that activities were. Some politicians wanted to forbid AIDS patients from food handling. It was like terrorism today. I don't know why they picked Peru but if you read the grant application I guarantee they gave a good reason. They probably had researchers who had been working in Peruvian brothels for a long time, which they didn't have in the US.
So they were public health researchers trying to figure out how to stop 5,000 Americans from dying every year. Which is pretty important if your mother needs a transfusion during surgery in a hospital.
There is no government-funded research on "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box?" Like most anti-government conservatives, you are reduced to making things up.
No, you're right, I didn't have to make things up, I just had to wait for you to provide examples for me.
I can't deal with people who make things up. When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
You can't give somebody a responsibility without giving them the resources (financial and otherwise).
That part, however, I don't: where do you think that money comes from in the first place? It makes no sense to send money to a central location just to beg for it back (except for emergencies that overwhelm the local region). The day to day stuff should be funded locally.
Unfortunately, the states are not funding their local health departments, and are instead cutting back. That came out in the morning-after analysis of the New England Compounding Center epidemic. Many of the epidemiologists who worked day and night to figure out the cause of the epidemic that killed 100 people knew that they were being fired.
It seems to be a result of the anti-tax movement.
New York City had a world-class health department at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They traced epidemics. They created new vaccines. They did basic research. They were a model for the country. Unfortunately, after one of NYC's budget crises, during the 1960s, they were cut back significantly, and Giuliani turned them into a forensics lab.
Although it's a different topic, the same goes for transportation funding: it makes no sense for Portland to pay for Boston's big dig and Boston to pay for Portland's light rail, and Wyoming shouldn't have to pay for either. There's a case to be made for the reverse: helping rural areas with transportation needs, though only to a limited extent.
Medical research doesn't work that way. They're national (and international) problems, not local problems. Texas has a problem with hookworms. Rockefeller University in NYC has a team of researchers working on the basic science of hookworms (they actually do), and out of that basic research effort they have a good understanding of how to deal with hookworms. When Texas gives money to their agriculture department to deal with hookworms, all the Texas agriculture department knows how to do is teach farmers how to spray DDT to kill the hookworms. They don't have anybody to deal with the molecular biology of hookworms (if they did, he would probably go to Rockefeller). Rockefeller's research benefits everybody. The Texas agriculture department has to show the legislature how they benefited local people. Basic research is hard to justify to legislators.
Your example is ridiculous, and you're putting words in other people's mouths. Studying sea sponges doesn't even begin to meet the criterion of "something stupid". "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box", that's something stupid.
After the fact, studying sea sponges seems like a great idea.
But before the importance becomes obvious, or for the many equally valid studies that need to be done for every one that pans out, congressmen and anti-government types denounce them. One of Proximire's Golden Fleece awards was for a study of the sex life of the screw-worm fly, which sounds silly until you think for ten seconds about the agricultural significance of this parasite.
Another Golden Fleece awards was for the study of activities in a Peruvian brothel, the significance of which should be obvious to anyone who heard of AIDS. (Come to think of it, I probably have to spell it out for you: Doctors have to know what sexual activities people participate in, and whether they spread AIDS, in order to save lives. If you are an MD, and you disagree, I will be interested in your opinion.)
There is no government-funded research on "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box?" Like most anti-government conservatives, you are reduced to making things up. That's because if you picked a real NSF grant, it would obviously have value.
Every developed country in the world developed their industry with heavy use of government-subsidized research. Everybody who is actually in industry running businesses bigger than a gas station knows this.
I remember years ago when some anti-government anti-tax Republicans tried to shut down the NSF, NIH and other government research institutions, and free the American corporations to do their magic in the marketplace. The strongest objections came from the American corporations, many of which were started with government-funded academic research, and others of which were developing research that was done in academic labs with NSF grants. These corporations are also big contributors to the Republican Party, so there's no debate any more, except on street corners and the Reason web site.
Since there are about 4-5,000 workplace fatalities a year, virtually all of them preventable, that's a good return for the money. [...] So if CDC doesn't do this stuff, nobody will.
Then what is OSHA for?
That's a good question. I'll remember it next time I talk to somebody from one of those agencies.
I would observe from reading their reports that there are a lot of diseases and injury patterns that overlap. There are electrocutions in the workplace and elsewhere. You can learn a lot by studying electrocutions as a workplace accident, but you can also learn a lot by studying electrocutions in general.
And OSHA is directed more at enforcement in the workplace. They go around making sure that workers are following safe practices, and can give fines to employers if they're not. CDC doesn't go around to IV drug users and tell them how to shoot up safely; they just analyze the data.
Whether or not they're acting on the responsibility, it's still their responsibility... and generally local people are best equipped to take into account local environmental factors. When they abdicate their responsibility, well then you have to decide whether to be a nanny or not.
Some parts of public health can be handled locally, and some parts of public health can only be handled on a national or international level. They can't figure out the pattern of an epidemic based on local occurrences alone. They have to look at the national or international patterns, and they need national and international expertise. When doctors have people dying in one city, and another city, of something new, they can't figure out what it is until they collect all the reports together on a national level.
That's not a political or economic decision, it's one of the requirements of science. That's what happened with the New England Compounding Center contaminated steroids (and every drug adverse event epidemic). That's what happened with AIDS.
State health departments don't have the equipment and expertise to do a lot of things. Hospital disease laboratories are only equipped to identify infections that are common in their area. Why stock a laboratory with expensive agents that you'll never use? When hospitals get a patient with an unusual disease, they can't identify it in their own labs and they have to send the samples to the CDC.
You can't give somebody a responsibility without giving them the resources (financial and otherwise). The states are now cutting the budgets for their local public health departments. The people who are abdicating their responsibility are the lawmakers who are cutting the budget.
We as a society have decided, thousands of years ago, that we would be a "nanny." Humans knew how about infectious diseases since ancient times. Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations that treating disease was a proper role of government. You can't fight an epidemic with a free market. Many people can't afford to pay for health care. When your neighbor gets sick, you will get sick.
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Having done time in a "gifted and talented" program in elementary school, I think the best thing the schools can do for top performers is give 'em a library card. Turn 'em loose once they know how to read and work with a card catalog and a search engine. Smart kids don't need to socialize with kids their own age. They need to socialize with the adults they'll eventually become.
Unfortunately they're closing down the libraries. When I grew up in New York, the neighborhood libraries were open 9am to 9pm, 7 days a week. Now, a lot of the libraries have been shut down, and the hours cut back so you can't work in the evenings.
The Internet is a nice addition to the library, but it's a poor substitute.
To way too many people "critical thinking" seems to just mean criticizing the establishment just because it's the establishment.
Here's one definition of critical thinking:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Critical thinking consists of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth. Then too, there are specific types of critical thinking that are characteristic of different subject matter: ThatÃ(TM)s what we mean when we refer to Ãoethinking like a scientistà or Ãoethinking like a historian.Ã
Deliberately destroying equipment because it uses a fake component goes to a whole new level of nastiness.
This is like a sysadmin who has a dispute with his boss deleting all the files and quitting his job.
You are running a driver/firmware update on a product which isn't theirs. Just like with a laptop if you run a BIOS update on the wrong product and it destroys your machine the vendor isn't responsible.
This is more like an admin who quits his job and wipes out the whole system before he goes.
I read a few of the Mercedes auto safety studies. They were always the neatest, best organized papers. Everybody else used trend lines. The Mercedes engineers used probability ellipses.
I saw a report in Automotive News of a presentation by a Mercedes engineer on why they can protect a passenger up to 50 mph, but not above.
He said that the way they protect a passenger in a head-on collision was by having the front end collapse. The front end was about 50 inches long. When the car crashed into a solid barrier at 50 mph, the front end would crush, and it would take 50 inches, at 50 g, to bring the passenger compartment to a stop.
If the car was going faster than 50 mph, it couldn't stop in 50 inches, the engine would go into the passenger compartment, and the passenger compartment would begin to disintegrate.
Since the kinetic energy of the car was KE=mv^2, the KE would increase as the square of the velocity, so the 50-inch front end of the car would also have to increase as the square of the velocity. If the car was going at 70 mph, the front end would have to be 100 inches to stop the car in 100 inches at 50 g. You could make the front end stiffer, but that would make the deceleration higher, and 50 g was about the human limit.
So they designed the car to protect you by absorbing energy and getting squashed. The best accident is one in which the car is totaled and you're safe. That's the way it's supposed to work.
I knew several automotive engineers. Everyone who could afford it bought a Mercedes. Good car.
I can only comment from personal experience. Seat belt wearing rates are very high in Australia (to the point where I don't know ANYONE who doesn't) and I always wear a seat belt.
I lost control of a mini cooper S at approx 80 kph. The car spun, then righted it self before driving off the road directly into a very large tree that didn't move a mm.
Actually, many of the seat belt and auto safety studies I read were from Australia.
I'm glad that you got out of it OK and that you got a good story out of it.
I read many accident reports of collisions like yours, a front-end collision against a solid barrier at 80 kph (60 mph), where the occupants were wearing seat belts, and they survived -- before the days of air bags.
The classic study was by Nils Bohlin for Volvo. He found that nobody died in an accident up to 60 mph if they were wearing the three-pont lap and shoulder belt. As long as the passenger compartment remained intact, they survived. A car can hit a tree head-on, the engine compartment will crush like an accordion, but the passenger compartment will remain intact up to about 60 mph. Above 60 mph, the engine and transmission shell will go into the passenger compartment, the passenger compartment will collapse, and the survival declines significantly. That's consistent with your experience.
Nils I. Bohlin, (1967). "A Statistical Analysis of 28,000 Accidents with Emphasis on Occupant Restraint Value,". 11th Stapp Car Crash Conference. Society of Automotive Engineers. doi:10.4271/670925. SAE Technical Paper 670925. http://papers.sae.org/670925/
Airbags are for your head, seat belts are for your torso. If you enjoy slamming your head into your steering wheel, go ahead and disable your airbag. Even more fun are videos of an asymmetric head-on collision that favors one side over the other. The test dummies slam their heads into the frame of the car unless you have properly working forward and side airbags.
I used to work for an engineering society during the 1970s, and I read dozens of seat belt design papers and talked to engineers who designed them.
Those lap and shoulder belts were successfully designed so that in a collision up to at least 60 mph, the driver wouldn't hit the steering wheel, windshield, or windshield frame. These were collisions at about 60 degrees right and left, and with 2 cars offset by several feet. They proved it with computer models, crash tests and real-world studies.
It is true that lap and shoulder belts didn't provide as much protection against a side collision, but neither did airbags. Fortunately, those collisions were not as common. If another car hit the driver's seat head-on and perpendicularly, nobody had a practical way to save the driver. The side bags came after I left, and I'd like to see the studies.
A lot of the auto magazines of the time took the position that air bags added no significant safety, if you were wearing your seat belt. The only reason for requiring them was that we had a low seat belt wearing rate (and we still do).
In engineering terms, it seemed like a shame to spend $500 for complicated, falliable, single-use airbags, just because people refused to use $50 seat belts. But that's the way humans are, and you have to design for them.
I'd feel comfortable driving in a car with a well-designed seat belt and no airbags.
Auto manufacturers are required to report potential safety-related defects to the federal government. That information is a public record, so they have to put it on *.gov. That's easier than filling freedom of information act requests.
You should be able to go to kia.com, etc. but when you're dealing with life-threatening defects, it's a good practice to have a backup.
And as we know from the medical industry, it's a matter of judgment as to when you have enough reported defects to make a statistically significant decision that a hazard indeed exists. Manufacturers and government regulators often differ.
Google quickly populates with accurate results, but those accurate results will be mixed in with inaccurate results.
Some people have found that government sites are relatively accurate, compared to the other sources, or at least more accountable.
The reason the government is in the business of car recalls is that we left it to the auto companies in the past and they failed.
You don't suppose people get the same response to surfing the Internet, do you?
Oh, now I understand. You're reciting right-wing talking points.
http://www.redstate.com/2014/1...
No wonder you're incapable of an intelligent discussion.
We already make it illegal for foreigners to take out ads to support one side in an election. The Saudis or the Chinese can't contribute money to a political action committee.
Is that censorship? Is that acceptable to you?
Or do you want foreign governments -- say, Russia -- to be able to contribute money to our election campaigns, and not have to disclose it?
Right now rich foreigners are buying $100-million pied-a-terre penthouse apartments in Manhattan, and $100 million artworks at Southeby's. Would you like them to start collecting Congressmen too?
I find it hard to imagine with so many laws in the US that this is not only illegal but a felony?
America isn't Europe.
Right now it costs about $1 billion to run for president, and that money comes almost entirely from corporate interests and ideologically interested billionaires. It turns out that you can buy elections by spending enough money.
So a handful of billionaires and wealthy interest groups are taking over the government and running the country.
Is that a problem for you? Or do you think that's the way it should be?
I read about new medical research all day. It's my job. I just went to a conference last week on new medical technology. I talk to corporate executives about how they're financing their business. I talk to scientists about where their money is coming from. So I know a little bit about who invests money in new research, what they invest in, and what they don't.
Nobody in the industry or in academic medical research believes that private investment could fund the kind of research the NIH does. And I talk to the people in private industry who are looking to invest money. Bill Gates only "investing" in these companies as a charity, not because the investors will make a profit.
I also meet people who believe that the government can't do anything, and we should leave everything to private industry.
They're ideologues. They believe what they want to believe and they can't be changed by facts. The latest research by psychologists found that the more strongly the facts show that they're wrong, the more strongly they believe in their wrong ideas. They're like those doomsday cults that predicted the end of the world, and then, when the world didn't end, they just went on believing.
So I realize that you believe the government is wasting money on NIH research, no facts will convince you otherwise, and it's a waste of time trying.
I thought you had maybe a glimmer of willingness to consider ideas outside your preconceived beliefs. But now I see you don't.
I read the Case Records in the New England Journal of Medicine, and when they describe a case, they usually or always tell whether the person had traveled outside the U.S. Although this is at a referral hospital where they get the tough cases.
Just let me deal with the condoms.
First, what the fuck does Howie Katz know about NIH grants? If he knew anything, he'd know how to cite the grant so that somebody else could look it up and find out whether it was true. I checked NIH database and couldn't find it.
Second, the condoms he's talking about, as far as I can figure out, had funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and the Small Business Administration.
Third, the most common way AIDS is transmitted in this country is through anal intercourse, and this condom seems to be designed for the purpose of presenting that. The cost of treating AIDS over a patient's lifetime is about $500,000, which is usually paid by Medicaid or Medicare, and a lot of them go on disability, so anything that reduces the spread of AIDS is going to pay back the cost of development several times over.
Any stupid right-wing blogger can get a list of NIH grants, post it on his web site and say, "Look at how stupid they are," but in fact every grant has to give good reasons why this is a good use of government money, and the wingnuts leave that part out.
But what about the Austin problem? We can't abandon them.
There is currently no effective test to tell whether a person's presenting symptoms are from ebola or from the flu.
The simple effective test to tell whether somebody may have Ebola is to ask them, "Have you been outside the U.S. recently?" If they've been to West Africa, then you can worry about Ebola.
Our healthcare system is economically screwed up beyond comprehension, and Obamacare did absolutely nothing to adjust economic and outcome decisions for the better, just piled on more incentive to perform more needless and expensive testing.
For all his flaws, Obama did give a recess appointment to Donald Berwick as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick's demonstrated expertise was to adjust economic and outcome decisions for the better. He would have made decisions based on cost/benefit calculations like the UK NICE system. He managed a nationwide program that reduced hospital infections and saved lives, so he actually can deliver.
Unfortunately Berwick's appointment was sabotaged by the Republicans, who refused to confirm him, so her resigned.
That's called 20/20 hindsight, Mr. Armchair Surgeon General. Had you been there, with a patient with the symptoms of some viral infection, I'd have liked to see you saying "of course it's Ebola!", when in reality, there are dozens of alternative diagnoses, many of them much more likely.
I sure as hell would have asked, "Have you traveled outside the U.S. recently?"
Another Golden Fleece awards was for the study of activities in a Peruvian brothel, the significance of which should be obvious to anyone who heard of AIDS. (Come to think of it, I probably have to spell it out for you: Doctors have to know what sexual activities people participate in,
And to do that they have to spend US dollars studying brothels in Peru. Right. You're stretching things quite a distance here. Peruvian brothels are such a considerable source of the AIDS epidemic, right?
As a matter of fact, there were cases of AIDS coming into the US from Peru, but that's not the point. We had a new viral disease that nobody had ever seen before, it was killing 5,000 Americans a year before they had developed drugs for it, and doctors had very few ways to deal with it. One of the few things they could do is prevention, by discouraging people from engaging in the activities that spread AIDS. But they didn't know what that activities were. Some politicians wanted to forbid AIDS patients from food handling. It was like terrorism today. I don't know why they picked Peru but if you read the grant application I guarantee they gave a good reason. They probably had researchers who had been working in Peruvian brothels for a long time, which they didn't have in the US.
So they were public health researchers trying to figure out how to stop 5,000 Americans from dying every year. Which is pretty important if your mother needs a transfusion during surgery in a hospital.
There is no government-funded research on "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box?" Like most anti-government conservatives, you are reduced to making things up.
No, you're right, I didn't have to make things up, I just had to wait for you to provide examples for me.
I can't deal with people who make things up. When you've decided to tell the truth, let me know.
You can't give somebody a responsibility without giving them the resources (financial and otherwise).
That part, however, I don't: where do you think that money comes from in the first place? It makes no sense to send money to a central location just to beg for it back (except for emergencies that overwhelm the local region). The day to day stuff should be funded locally.
Unfortunately, the states are not funding their local health departments, and are instead cutting back. That came out in the morning-after analysis of the New England Compounding Center epidemic. Many of the epidemiologists who worked day and night to figure out the cause of the epidemic that killed 100 people knew that they were being fired.
It seems to be a result of the anti-tax movement.
New York City had a world-class health department at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They traced epidemics. They created new vaccines. They did basic research. They were a model for the country. Unfortunately, after one of NYC's budget crises, during the 1960s, they were cut back significantly, and Giuliani turned them into a forensics lab.
Although it's a different topic, the same goes for transportation funding: it makes no sense for Portland to pay for Boston's big dig and Boston to pay for Portland's light rail, and Wyoming shouldn't have to pay for either. There's a case to be made for the reverse: helping rural areas with transportation needs, though only to a limited extent.
Medical research doesn't work that way. They're national (and international) problems, not local problems. Texas has a problem with hookworms. Rockefeller University in NYC has a team of researchers working on the basic science of hookworms (they actually do), and out of that basic research effort they have a good understanding of how to deal with hookworms. When Texas gives money to their agriculture department to deal with hookworms, all the Texas agriculture department knows how to do is teach farmers how to spray DDT to kill the hookworms. They don't have anybody to deal with the molecular biology of hookworms (if they did, he would probably go to Rockefeller). Rockefeller's research benefits everybody. The Texas agriculture department has to show the legislature how they benefited local people. Basic research is hard to justify to legislators.
Your example is ridiculous, and you're putting words in other people's mouths. Studying sea sponges doesn't even begin to meet the criterion of "something stupid". "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box", that's something stupid.
After the fact, studying sea sponges seems like a great idea.
But before the importance becomes obvious, or for the many equally valid studies that need to be done for every one that pans out, congressmen and anti-government types denounce them. One of Proximire's Golden Fleece awards was for a study of the sex life of the screw-worm fly, which sounds silly until you think for ten seconds about the agricultural significance of this parasite.
Another Golden Fleece awards was for the study of activities in a Peruvian brothel, the significance of which should be obvious to anyone who heard of AIDS. (Come to think of it, I probably have to spell it out for you: Doctors have to know what sexual activities people participate in, and whether they spread AIDS, in order to save lives. If you are an MD, and you disagree, I will be interested in your opinion.)
There is no government-funded research on "Why do paperclips interconnect while stored in their box?" Like most anti-government conservatives, you are reduced to making things up. That's because if you picked a real NSF grant, it would obviously have value.
Every developed country in the world developed their industry with heavy use of government-subsidized research. Everybody who is actually in industry running businesses bigger than a gas station knows this.
I remember years ago when some anti-government anti-tax Republicans tried to shut down the NSF, NIH and other government research institutions, and free the American corporations to do their magic in the marketplace. The strongest objections came from the American corporations, many of which were started with government-funded academic research, and others of which were developing research that was done in academic labs with NSF grants. These corporations are also big contributors to the Republican Party, so there's no debate any more, except on street corners and the Reason web site.
Since there are about 4-5,000 workplace fatalities a year, virtually all of them preventable, that's a good return for the money. [...] So if CDC doesn't do this stuff, nobody will.
Then what is OSHA for?
That's a good question. I'll remember it next time I talk to somebody from one of those agencies.
I would observe from reading their reports that there are a lot of diseases and injury patterns that overlap. There are electrocutions in the workplace and elsewhere. You can learn a lot by studying electrocutions as a workplace accident, but you can also learn a lot by studying electrocutions in general.
And OSHA is directed more at enforcement in the workplace. They go around making sure that workers are following safe practices, and can give fines to employers if they're not. CDC doesn't go around to IV drug users and tell them how to shoot up safely; they just analyze the data.
Whether or not they're acting on the responsibility, it's still their responsibility... and generally local people are best equipped to take into account local environmental factors. When they abdicate their responsibility, well then you have to decide whether to be a nanny or not.
Some parts of public health can be handled locally, and some parts of public health can only be handled on a national or international level. They can't figure out the pattern of an epidemic based on local occurrences alone. They have to look at the national or international patterns, and they need national and international expertise. When doctors have people dying in one city, and another city, of something new, they can't figure out what it is until they collect all the reports together on a national level.
That's not a political or economic decision, it's one of the requirements of science. That's what happened with the New England Compounding Center contaminated steroids (and every drug adverse event epidemic). That's what happened with AIDS.
State health departments don't have the equipment and expertise to do a lot of things. Hospital disease laboratories are only equipped to identify infections that are common in their area. Why stock a laboratory with expensive agents that you'll never use? When hospitals get a patient with an unusual disease, they can't identify it in their own labs and they have to send the samples to the CDC.
You can't give somebody a responsibility without giving them the resources (financial and otherwise). The states are now cutting the budgets for their local public health departments. The people who are abdicating their responsibility are the lawmakers who are cutting the budget.
We as a society have decided, thousands of years ago, that we would be a "nanny." Humans knew how about infectious diseases since ancient times. Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations that treating disease was a proper role of government. You can't fight an epidemic with a free market. Many people can't afford to pay for health care. When your neighbor gets sick, you will get sick.