Glancing through the article, there don't seem to be any new dangers to children. There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were. So no need to panic.
"No need to panic" is one of the stupidest phrases in the English language.
Of course there's no need to panic. There's never a need to panic. The house is on fire? No need to panic. Your wife got shot in the head? No need to panic. The World Trade Center got hit by an airliner? No need to panic.
"Panic" is just a word to diminish a legitimate concern for a serious potential danger that is supported by scientific evidence that is about as solid as you usually get in real life.
Of course there are no new dangers to children. These are all old dangers, that are well-known to scientists, and have been denied by the industries that are selling these products. What's new here is that the evidence for these dangers is getting stronger and stronger, and the industry shills are looking more and more ridiculous when they try to argue that "the science is unproven" or "there's no need to panic."
For example, Herbert Needleman first published the dangers of lead toxicity in the 1970s. There was strong evidence that lead was causing damage to children's brains that you could measure in IQ tests and correlate with their blood lead levels. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
At the same time, the lead industry was selling tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive, which was the best way imaginable to distribute lead into the environment in a way that nobody could escape it. They were also selling lead paints, which were a good way to target lead to children, and to painters, and to the construction workers who finally demolished the houses at the end of their cycle.
The lead industry launched a well-funded campaign including lawsuits to discredit Needleman, which finally collapsed as the evidence for the dangers of lead grew and finally become overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now we have an article in one of the top 4 medical journals (which I read every week) in which the authors (endorsed by their peer-reviewers) say basically that we told you so, the evidence for the toxicity of these 11 industrial chemicals is even stronger now, and it's reasonable to conclude that these widespread industrial chemicals are causing measurable, significant neurological damage, especially in children, just like lead was doing, and we should do something about it now, rather than let industry lobbyists run the world and continue to harm people.
(And BTW they're talking about industrial chemicals, which are manufactured in quantities of hundreds of tons, and wind up being distributed widely in the environment, and have measurable and significant cognitive effects at parts per million. This isn't chemical phobia.)
Jackson wrote “requesting compensation as follows: $100,000.00 US deposited into my business bank account, additionally to be named the Official Photography Sponsor of The Color Run (Internationally) for the remainder of its existence, my Logo to be added in sponsors section next to Chevy on the bottom of your web pages. My name to read at the bottom of any photo’s used in legible print from the next print run forward as, Photogrph by Max Jackson.” He warned “if no efforts are made within 15 days, to contact me I will be forced to take further action.”
That sounds like he was overreaching. If that was his first communication, it was a bad mistake.
I do a lot of negotiations like this, and I've gotten advice from a lot of lawyers. The first step should be a friendly letter or phone call.
"Did you know that my photos are copyrighted, and you have to get my permission to use them?"
"Oh noes! Is that true? I never knew! I'm terribly sorry!"
"If you want to use them, you have to get my permission. It's customary for a photographer to charge money for his work. That's how we make a living. How much could you afford?"...
Under the copyright law, in order to transfer permissions to reuse a photo, the transaction has to be in writing. So they should have had a signed contract to use those photos on Facebook. They probably didn't. But they certainly didn't have a signed contract to use those photos anyplace else besides Facebook.
Copyright is one of those areas of law where you have all kinds of complicated rights (and all kinds of gray areas), but it usually costs you more money in legal costs to defend those rights than the matter at issue.
You're much better off if you can keep things friendly and out of the courts. That's true everywhere, but especially in copyright law.
I write articles. Sometimes I'd write a profile about a company or organization, and they would reprint one of my articles for a press kit or something in the apparently honest believe that this was the custom in the publishing business.
I'd usually call them up, explain copyright law to them, and figure out how much money they had. If they have a lot of money, I want some. I'd usually start out by asking for $1 a copy. I really don't have a good negotiating position, because I have no way of knowing how many copies they're making.
If they don't have any money, fuck it, let them have it. Sometimes it would be a patient's organization of people with a disease, who don't have rich sponsors. They spent all that time interviewing me. Sometimes they sent me materials. I can do something for them in return without feeling that I got ripped off.
One copyright lawyer in the publishing business told me that book authors prepare press kits, and they would customarily include copies of book reviews from newspapers and magazines in the press kits. He never heard of the authors paying the reviewers or the newspapers or magazines, and he never heard of the book authors being sued. It was just the custom of the industry, one of those courtesies that made everything easier for everyone in the long run.
As I recall Michael Geist gave examples of documentary film makers who had incidentally gotten shots with snippets of copyrighted music or video incidentally in the background. [citation needed]
They showed the documentary at film festivals, got good reviews, and got offers to distribute nationally and show on TV.
When the distributors' lawyers looked at it, they said they had to get permission from the copyright owners to use the snippets. The copyright owners asked an exorbitant fee, and they couldn't use it.
Geist said that some of the examples were clearly fair use, and they had a legal right to use it, but it would cost even more in legal fees than the copyright owners' exorbitant demands.
The Olympics are a special case. They had a copyright law written just for them.
You are obviously not from the US so let me explain this to you. Our Constitution guarantees a right to a speedy trial.
I'm from the US too. Our Constitution guarantees a lot of things. But the authorities who run this country don't let you have those rights. Especially non-citizens.
In the US federal prosecutors can lie. They can falsely tell the judge that they have information that proves you're a criminal, but they can't disclose it because that would be a national security threat (even when it isn't). As they did for example to Rahinah Ibrahim. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
We have a Constitutional right to hear the charges against us, cross-examine witnesses, and rebut those charges. But we can't get those rights any more when the government doesn't feel like it. And they don't feel like it in national security cases.
And you can be tried before a rubber-stamp judge, or a hanging jury of federal civil servants from Virginia.
You're claiming that Julian Assange should trust a system like that?
If he didn't have COPD, he'd probably live another 5 or 10 years longer than whatever he's got.
"Probably" indicates more likely than not. Do you have any statistics to indicate that an average 82-year-old male without COPD is "more likely than not" to live to 90 or 95? I don't think you do.
Yes I do. I went to a few medical conferences on COPD. COPD is the third biggest cause of death in the U.S. It gets a chapter in every introductory medical textbook, like the Merck Manual and Harrison's, and there are a lot of medical journal articles on it. I remember seeing a chart of the lung function of a healthy individual compared with one with COPD over the course of their lifetimes. At the bottom of the chart was a line indicating the minimum oxygen capacity you need to survive, and the people with COPD hit that line a lot faster than the people without COPD. It looked like they hit the line 10 years earlier. Correcting for age, it would be about 5-8 years at age 80. Every pulmonologist knows this.
An otherwise "healthy" 80-year-old has a life expectancy of another 5 or 8 years. If they're at the end stage of COPD, where they need oxygen as Nimoy does, they're lucky to last another 6 months or a year.
Still didn't claim it was safe, just didn't tell you it was dangerous.
I sure knew at that point smoking was bad, which was why I never even tried it.
When you have people in cigarette marketing who spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to smoke cigarettes even though it's bad for them, and succeed
I think it's reaching to claim marketing has succeeded in that regard. You have no idea if that person would have smoked anyway without the marketing; it seems very likely to me that MOST smokers would have been smokers without marketing simply because most are introduced to (or pushed into) smoking by friends.
It's true that one reason people start smoking is because their friends smoke. But the tobacco companies knew that they people were also more likely to start smoking if they were exposed to an advertising blitz.
The tobacco companies spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars advertising in womens' magazines. In the free market system, a company does not spend money unless they think it will help them sell more of their stuff. They also had product placement in movies and TV, where glamorous celebrities would smoke their cigarettes.
They didn't just spend the money; they monitored their sales after every marketing campaign to find out what works and what doesn't work. They hired marketing experts, and psychologists, and anybody else who could help them figure out what would boost sales.
After the tobacco lawsuits, the tobacco companies had to deposit all the documents that came out in the lawsuits in a public archive. There are tobacco company documents in there that archive that describe this.
It's true that people knew (in a general way) that smoking was bad for you, but they didn't realize how bad. I didn't realize how bad it was until I read the Surgeon General's Report in 1964.
A lot of people thought, "I'll get lung cancer, but by that time they'll have a cure for it." That wasn't the half of it. First, there is still no cure for lung cancer. You get one round of chemotherapy, you get a few months to a year, the cancer comes back, you get another few months to a year, and you're dead. Second, lung cancer is only about 10% of the cigarette-related deaths. COPD, which is what Nimroy has, is almost entirely caused by smoking in this country, and kills even more people, and also has no cure.
And as the tobacco archives show, the tobacco companies published articles claiming that cigarettes weren't that dangerous. A lot of people fell for those lies.
Perhaps in the distant past smoking marketers claimed smoking was safe, but I never saw any sign of that... they simply make smoking glamorous while glossing over the dangers, but it's not like they actively hide the dangers.
Was 1977 the distant past? I know lots of people who used to write for womens' magazines, such as Ms. They got half to 3/4 their advertising from cigarettes, and they wrote about every every cancer except lung cancer. They depicted women smoking cigarettes as glamorous. And Ms. magazine directed itself to teenage girls, and gave them a model of how to act.
Now, those same teenage girls who became addicted to cigarettes because Ms. magazine told them it was cool, are now getting lung cancer and all the other cigarette-caused diseases, like the COPD that Nimoy has.
Nor is it the case that any person who smokes does not know the danger at this point. There are millions of sources telling you smoking is bad. People do things they know are bad for them for whatever reason; that will never stop and it's unfair to blame marketing for human nature.
When you have people in cigarette marketing who spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to smoke cigarettes even though it's bad for them, and succeed, then I think it's fair to blame them for getting people addicted on cigarettes.
they are doing a job that any high school graduate could technically do (and up until the advent of state run schools and unnecessary regulation, people did).
You think any high school graduate could teach K-12 science? You don't know much about science. You especially don't know much about teaching science. Take a look at some of the articles on science teaching in Science magazine sometimes.
The teachers unions have consistently increased the regulation on who can teach by legislation to the point where I can teach at the college level but can't teach in the public grade school or high school. All to justify jacking up the salaries of teachers and increasing the power of the unions.
It's actually easier to teach science at the college level than at the K-12 level. They're only able to understand certain things at certain ages, and teachers have to know what that is. For example, according to the research, most junior high school kids aren't able to understand the concept of molecules. Don't believe it? Look at the research. Why should they? Most of the world's smartest adults had a hard time understanding molecules until the 18th century. I've seen museum exhibits that supposedly teach 10-year-olds about DNA. If you ask some of those kids to explain DNA, you'll realize that they were at best memorizing concepts they didn't understand.
The Walton Family Foundation is a charitable institution, giving more than any other business. National Audubon Society, Harvard University, Georgetown University, Nature Conservancy, Inc., etc. What profit do they get for giving millions to these?
Billionaires give money to Harvard University so that their kids can go to Harvard University.
You don't think George W. Bush got into Harvard because of his SATs, do you?
Why do some feel that charitable contributions should be taxed? Say someone makes a billion dollars this year and gives away that billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor... that should be it. If the government takes half a billion off the top, that is half a billion less for those hungry and poor.
It's the same as giving someone a welfare check and then taxing half of it. Suggesting that would be considered preposterous by the same people who want to tax the hell out of the charitable contributions.
I'd like to know the name of that someone who gave away a billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor. I haven't heard of any in New York City. After Giuliani and Bloomberg made it tougher to get food stamps, I know a lot of hungry people who could use some extra food.
Most of the billionaires in New York City are like David Koch, who gave his millions to marble edifices like Lincoln Center, which is one of the playgrounds of the rich, where he can throw parties for his rich friends. Everybody else pays taxes. Why shouldn't he? Why should he get tax breaks for building his party venue in Lincoln Center?
On the contrary, Koch contributes to Republicans who take food stamps and unemployment benefits away from the poor.
Another stunt is park "conservatories." Giuliani and Bloomberg handed NYC's best parks, like Central Park, Washington Square Park, and Bryant Park, to private "conservatories" that raise millions of tax-exempt dollars from billionaires who then run the parks as their private back yards. People are complaining that we want to use the parks as living spaces, but they're turning them into their private flower gardens. They blocked off access to the Central Park lake, put up fences, and planted flowers, so you can't sit by the lake any more. They kicked the hot dog vendors out of Washington Square Park, and turned it into a flower garden, with cops to patrol it. That used to be everybody's back yard. Now it belongs to a few.
I've got a better suggestion for these billionaires. If they have so much money, they can afford to pay taxes. Let's just take the money from them -- it's called taxes -- and use it to maintain our parks the way we want to, with access for all the people. David Koch doesn't like it? He threatens to leave New York City? Get the fuck out, if you don't want to pay your share. We've got enough billionaires on Park Avenue already.
Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal By DAVID CARR Published: December 13, 2009
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.
Accurate, objective, well-selected reporting that I can depend on is easily worth $200.
You pay a dollar premium to an insurance company. They take 15% or 20% of that off the top for administrative costs and profits (that's the item called "loss ratio" in their annual report). The doctor gets 80 cents, and he has to spend another 15 cents for administrative costs, so he's left with 65 cents of your premium dollar.
The funny thing is that most of that doesn't go to insurance company profits, it goes to administrative costs.
The other ways that the American health care system is more expensive than any others is doctor's income ($200,000/year for a general practitioner, $400,000/year or more for a specialist), over-treatment (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health/doctors-and-hospitals/choosing-wisely/index.htm), and our heavy over-use of technology (we over-use CT scans so much that they're a significant cause of cancer http://www.consumerreports.org...).
1. Estimates of just medicare/medicaid fraud in the US easily approach $100 billion. I'd bet those estimates are conservative.
According to that link, the GAO estimated $48 billion in "improper payments." I suppose that's "approaching" $100 billion, if you are free to take any number and double it.
The GAO didn't say "fraud," they said "improper payments." Big difference.
The author of that article said that Medicare fraud is 10%, but private insurance fraud is only 1.5%. Funny thing, he used to work for the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, which is a private insurance industry lobbyist.
I went to a doctor about a bad knee. He gave me an x-ray, and billed the insurance company $1,000. When I got home, I read a medical journal article about my knee problem. They said that x-rays aren't necessary. I wonder how much the private insurance industry loses to fraud. I'd like a calculation made by somebody who isn't a lobbyist for the private insurance industry.
I never really liked team sports. I'd rather ride a bicycle.
I do think I understand why people are into sports teams, though. It's a tribal ritual that seems to serve a function of group cohesiveness. I got that from reading the evolutionary biology stories in New Scientist and Science.
In 1964 a friend of mine was murdered in Mississippi by KKK members while trying to register black people to vote. So I don't think 1968 is that long ago.
We tend to welcome immigrants in this country, but I think they have an obligation to understand our values and learn our history.
The racism against black people in America was worse than the racism any other minority (and I say this after reading Korematsu and the Chinese Exclusion Act). That's a fact of American life and American history, a subject that you should learn more about.
Even today, if you follow Slashdot, you should have seen the story about the stop-and-frisk laws under Mayor Bloomberg. http://politics.slashdot.org/s... The testimony in that case, which was quoted in the judge's opinion, showed irrefutably that the cops were singling out black people to stop on the street, and illegally searching them, because they were black. In addition, this policy was approved and required by police supervisors all the way to the top. This resulted in marijuana arrests, and sometimes convictions, because the district attorney's office slowed down the cases when they tried to defend themselves in court. This didn't happen to white people.
This was clear evidence of discrimination against blacks, that continued until the end of Bloomberg's term on 31 December 2013.
I could go on and on with cases like this of discrimination against blacks.
You simply can't find discrimination like this against asians.
If evidence like this doesn't convince you, I don't know what will.
Right. You think you can create an IQ test which can validly compare people in the developed world to people in a continent that doesn't have free education.
How can you generate your own power? Oil-dependent generators are not cost efficient. Coal is large investment. Extract your own oil and refine it? Insanely complex and costly. Nuclear is impossible, politically tough.
The reason we are dependent on oil and coal is because corporations profit from it, they can monopolize it.
If you're a nation or corporation, you can think of safe nuclear, like thorium-based nuclear power.
Simple. In Atlas Shrugged, the creators and makers went off to Galt Gulch and created electric power out of the static electricity in the sky.
Once you drown government in a bathtub, anything can happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Glancing through the article, there don't seem to be any new dangers to children. There seem to be more things that are _known_ to be dangerous, but these things obviously were dangerous even when we didn't know they were. So no need to panic.
"No need to panic" is one of the stupidest phrases in the English language.
Of course there's no need to panic. There's never a need to panic. The house is on fire? No need to panic. Your wife got shot in the head? No need to panic. The World Trade Center got hit by an airliner? No need to panic.
"Panic" is just a word to diminish a legitimate concern for a serious potential danger that is supported by scientific evidence that is about as solid as you usually get in real life.
Of course there are no new dangers to children. These are all old dangers, that are well-known to scientists, and have been denied by the industries that are selling these products. What's new here is that the evidence for these dangers is getting stronger and stronger, and the industry shills are looking more and more ridiculous when they try to argue that "the science is unproven" or "there's no need to panic."
For example, Herbert Needleman first published the dangers of lead toxicity in the 1970s. There was strong evidence that lead was causing damage to children's brains that you could measure in IQ tests and correlate with their blood lead levels. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
At the same time, the lead industry was selling tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive, which was the best way imaginable to distribute lead into the environment in a way that nobody could escape it. They were also selling lead paints, which were a good way to target lead to children, and to painters, and to the construction workers who finally demolished the houses at the end of their cycle.
The lead industry launched a well-funded campaign including lawsuits to discredit Needleman, which finally collapsed as the evidence for the dangers of lead grew and finally become overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Now we have an article in one of the top 4 medical journals (which I read every week) in which the authors (endorsed by their peer-reviewers) say basically that we told you so, the evidence for the toxicity of these 11 industrial chemicals is even stronger now, and it's reasonable to conclude that these widespread industrial chemicals are causing measurable, significant neurological damage, especially in children, just like lead was doing, and we should do something about it now, rather than let industry lobbyists run the world and continue to harm people.
(And BTW they're talking about industrial chemicals, which are manufactured in quantities of hundreds of tons, and wind up being distributed widely in the environment, and have measurable and significant cognitive effects at parts per million. This isn't chemical phobia.)
According to a comment at that link:
Jackson wrote “requesting compensation as follows:
$100,000.00 US deposited into my business bank account, additionally to be named the Official Photography Sponsor of The Color Run (Internationally) for the remainder of its existence, my Logo to be added in sponsors section next to Chevy on the bottom of your web pages. My name to read at the bottom of any photo’s used in legible print from the next print run forward as, Photogrph by Max Jackson.” He warned “if no efforts are made within 15 days, to contact me I will be forced to take further action.”
That sounds like he was overreaching. If that was his first communication, it was a bad mistake.
I do a lot of negotiations like this, and I've gotten advice from a lot of lawyers. The first step should be a friendly letter or phone call.
"Did you know that my photos are copyrighted, and you have to get my permission to use them?"
"Oh noes! Is that true? I never knew! I'm terribly sorry!"
"If you want to use them, you have to get my permission. It's customary for a photographer to charge money for his work. That's how we make a living. How much could you afford?" ...
Under the copyright law, in order to transfer permissions to reuse a photo, the transaction has to be in writing. So they should have had a signed contract to use those photos on Facebook. They probably didn't. But they certainly didn't have a signed contract to use those photos anyplace else besides Facebook.
Copyright is one of those areas of law where you have all kinds of complicated rights (and all kinds of gray areas), but it usually costs you more money in legal costs to defend those rights than the matter at issue.
You're much better off if you can keep things friendly and out of the courts. That's true everywhere, but especially in copyright law.
I write articles. Sometimes I'd write a profile about a company or organization, and they would reprint one of my articles for a press kit or something in the apparently honest believe that this was the custom in the publishing business.
I'd usually call them up, explain copyright law to them, and figure out how much money they had. If they have a lot of money, I want some. I'd usually start out by asking for $1 a copy. I really don't have a good negotiating position, because I have no way of knowing how many copies they're making.
If they don't have any money, fuck it, let them have it. Sometimes it would be a patient's organization of people with a disease, who don't have rich sponsors. They spent all that time interviewing me. Sometimes they sent me materials. I can do something for them in return without feeling that I got ripped off.
One copyright lawyer in the publishing business told me that book authors prepare press kits, and they would customarily include copies of book reviews from newspapers and magazines in the press kits. He never heard of the authors paying the reviewers or the newspapers or magazines, and he never heard of the book authors being sued. It was just the custom of the industry, one of those courtesies that made everything easier for everyone in the long run.
As I recall Michael Geist gave examples of documentary film makers who had incidentally gotten shots with snippets of copyrighted music or video incidentally in the background. [citation needed]
They showed the documentary at film festivals, got good reviews, and got offers to distribute nationally and show on TV.
When the distributors' lawyers looked at it, they said they had to get permission from the copyright owners to use the snippets. The copyright owners asked an exorbitant fee, and they couldn't use it.
Geist said that some of the examples were clearly fair use, and they had a legal right to use it, but it would cost even more in legal fees than the copyright owners' exorbitant demands.
The Olympics are a special case. They had a copyright law written just for them.
You are obviously not from the US so let me explain this to you. Our Constitution guarantees a right to a speedy trial.
I'm from the US too. Our Constitution guarantees a lot of things. But the authorities who run this country don't let you have those rights. Especially non-citizens.
In the US federal prosecutors can lie. They can falsely tell the judge that they have information that proves you're a criminal, but they can't disclose it because that would be a national security threat (even when it isn't). As they did for example to Rahinah Ibrahim. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
We have a Constitutional right to hear the charges against us, cross-examine witnesses, and rebut those charges. But we can't get those rights any more when the government doesn't feel like it. And they don't feel like it in national security cases.
And you can be tried before a rubber-stamp judge, or a hanging jury of federal civil servants from Virginia.
You're claiming that Julian Assange should trust a system like that?
You sound like the fox in Aesop's fables.
If he didn't have COPD, he'd probably live another 5 or 10 years longer than whatever he's got.
"Probably" indicates more likely than not. Do you have any statistics to indicate that an average 82-year-old male without COPD is "more likely than not" to live to 90 or 95? I don't think you do.
Yes I do. I went to a few medical conferences on COPD. COPD is the third biggest cause of death in the U.S. It gets a chapter in every introductory medical textbook, like the Merck Manual and Harrison's, and there are a lot of medical journal articles on it. I remember seeing a chart of the lung function of a healthy individual compared with one with COPD over the course of their lifetimes. At the bottom of the chart was a line indicating the minimum oxygen capacity you need to survive, and the people with COPD hit that line a lot faster than the people without COPD. It looked like they hit the line 10 years earlier. Correcting for age, it would be about 5-8 years at age 80. Every pulmonologist knows this.
An otherwise "healthy" 80-year-old has a life expectancy of another 5 or 8 years. If they're at the end stage of COPD, where they need oxygen as Nimoy does, they're lucky to last another 6 months or a year.
Was 1977 the distant past?
Still didn't claim it was safe, just didn't tell you it was dangerous.
I sure knew at that point smoking was bad, which was why I never even tried it.
When you have people in cigarette marketing who spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to smoke cigarettes even though it's bad for them, and succeed
I think it's reaching to claim marketing has succeeded in that regard. You have no idea if that person would have smoked anyway without the marketing; it seems very likely to me that MOST smokers would have been smokers without marketing simply because most are introduced to (or pushed into) smoking by friends.
It's true that one reason people start smoking is because their friends smoke. But the tobacco companies knew that they people were also more likely to start smoking if they were exposed to an advertising blitz.
The tobacco companies spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars advertising in womens' magazines. In the free market system, a company does not spend money unless they think it will help them sell more of their stuff. They also had product placement in movies and TV, where glamorous celebrities would smoke their cigarettes.
They didn't just spend the money; they monitored their sales after every marketing campaign to find out what works and what doesn't work. They hired marketing experts, and psychologists, and anybody else who could help them figure out what would boost sales.
After the tobacco lawsuits, the tobacco companies had to deposit all the documents that came out in the lawsuits in a public archive. There are tobacco company documents in there that archive that describe this.
It's true that people knew (in a general way) that smoking was bad for you, but they didn't realize how bad. I didn't realize how bad it was until I read the Surgeon General's Report in 1964.
A lot of people thought, "I'll get lung cancer, but by that time they'll have a cure for it." That wasn't the half of it. First, there is still no cure for lung cancer. You get one round of chemotherapy, you get a few months to a year, the cancer comes back, you get another few months to a year, and you're dead. Second, lung cancer is only about 10% of the cigarette-related deaths. COPD, which is what Nimroy has, is almost entirely caused by smoking in this country, and kills even more people, and also has no cure.
And as the tobacco archives show, the tobacco companies published articles claiming that cigarettes weren't that dangerous. A lot of people fell for those lies.
Leonard Nimoy is 82 and he probably has a few more years ahead of him. Was he planning on living to be 1000 years old?
Smoking has pluses and minuses.
If he didn't have COPD, he'd probably live another 5 or 10 years longer than whatever he's got.
COPD is one of the more painful ways to die. It's like breathing through a straw.
Why would someone ignore all the warning signs and stumble blindly ahead on a path to certain doom?
Because nicotine is addicting.
Just like heroin or cocaine, except more so.
Perhaps in the distant past smoking marketers claimed smoking was safe, but I never saw any sign of that... they simply make smoking glamorous while glossing over the dangers, but it's not like they actively hide the dangers.
Was 1977 the distant past? I know lots of people who used to write for womens' magazines, such as Ms. They got half to 3/4 their advertising from cigarettes, and they wrote about every every cancer except lung cancer. They depicted women smoking cigarettes as glamorous. And Ms. magazine directed itself to teenage girls, and gave them a model of how to act.
Now, those same teenage girls who became addicted to cigarettes because Ms. magazine told them it was cool, are now getting lung cancer and all the other cigarette-caused diseases, like the COPD that Nimoy has.
Nor is it the case that any person who smokes does not know the danger at this point. There are millions of sources telling you smoking is bad. People do things they know are bad for them for whatever reason; that will never stop and it's unfair to blame marketing for human nature.
When you have people in cigarette marketing who spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to smoke cigarettes even though it's bad for them, and succeed, then I think it's fair to blame them for getting people addicted on cigarettes.
they are doing a job that any high school graduate could technically do (and up until the advent of state run schools and unnecessary regulation, people did).
You think any high school graduate could teach K-12 science? You don't know much about science. You especially don't know much about teaching science. Take a look at some of the articles on science teaching in Science magazine sometimes.
The teachers unions have consistently increased the regulation on who can teach by legislation to the point where I can teach at the college level but can't teach in the public grade school or high school. All to justify jacking up the salaries of teachers and increasing the power of the unions.
It's actually easier to teach science at the college level than at the K-12 level. They're only able to understand certain things at certain ages, and teachers have to know what that is. For example, according to the research, most junior high school kids aren't able to understand the concept of molecules. Don't believe it? Look at the research. Why should they? Most of the world's smartest adults had a hard time understanding molecules until the 18th century. I've seen museum exhibits that supposedly teach 10-year-olds about DNA. If you ask some of those kids to explain DNA, you'll realize that they were at best memorizing concepts they didn't understand.
The Walton Family Foundation is a charitable institution, giving more than any other business. National Audubon Society, Harvard University, Georgetown University, Nature Conservancy, Inc., etc. What profit do they get for giving millions to these?
Billionaires give money to Harvard University so that their kids can go to Harvard University.
You don't think George W. Bush got into Harvard because of his SATs, do you?
"tax-free kindness of wealthy strangers"
Why do some feel that charitable contributions should be taxed? Say someone makes a billion dollars this year and gives away that billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor... that should be it. If the government takes half a billion off the top, that is half a billion less for those hungry and poor.
It's the same as giving someone a welfare check and then taxing half of it. Suggesting that would be considered preposterous by the same people who want to tax the hell out of the charitable contributions.
I'd like to know the name of that someone who gave away a billion dollars to feed the hungry or buy clothes for the poor. I haven't heard of any in New York City. After Giuliani and Bloomberg made it tougher to get food stamps, I know a lot of hungry people who could use some extra food.
Most of the billionaires in New York City are like David Koch, who gave his millions to marble edifices like Lincoln Center, which is one of the playgrounds of the rich, where he can throw parties for his rich friends. Everybody else pays taxes. Why shouldn't he? Why should he get tax breaks for building his party venue in Lincoln Center?
On the contrary, Koch contributes to Republicans who take food stamps and unemployment benefits away from the poor.
Another stunt is park "conservatories." Giuliani and Bloomberg handed NYC's best parks, like Central Park, Washington Square Park, and Bryant Park, to private "conservatories" that raise millions of tax-exempt dollars from billionaires who then run the parks as their private back yards. People are complaining that we want to use the parks as living spaces, but they're turning them into their private flower gardens. They blocked off access to the Central Park lake, put up fences, and planted flowers, so you can't sit by the lake any more. They kicked the hot dog vendors out of Washington Square Park, and turned it into a flower garden, with cops to patrol it. That used to be everybody's back yard. Now it belongs to a few.
I've got a better suggestion for these billionaires. If they have so much money, they can afford to pay taxes. Let's just take the money from them -- it's called taxes -- and use it to maintain our parks the way we want to, with access for all the people. David Koch doesn't like it? He threatens to leave New York City? Get the fuck out, if you don't want to pay your share. We've got enough billionaires on Park Avenue already.
Also if you don't get it done by deadline you get shot and turned into dog food.
Maybe Obama could take some lessons from GL.
Also when you go to N Korea don't eat the dog food.
Until Rupert Murdoch took it over.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12...
Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at The Journal
By DAVID CARR
Published: December 13, 2009
Mr. Baker, a neoconservative columnist of acute political views, has been especially active in managing coverage in Washington, creating significant grumbling, if not resistance, from the staff there. Reporters say the coverage of the Obama administration is reflexively critical, the health care debate is generally framed in terms of costs rather than benefits — “health care reform” is a generally forbidden phrase — and global warming skeptics have gotten a steady ride. (Of course, objectivity is in the eyes of the reader.)
The pro-business, antigovernment shift in the news pages has broken into plain view in the last year. On Aug. 12, a fairly straight down the middle front page article on President Obama’s management style ended up with the provocative headline, “A President as Micromanager: How Much Detail Is Enough?” The original article included a contrast between President Jimmy Carter’s tendency to go deep in the weeds of every issue with President George W. Bush’s predilection for minimal involvement, according to someone who saw the draft. By the time the article ran, it included only the swipe at Mr. Carter.
Accurate, objective, well-selected reporting that I can depend on is easily worth $200.
Propaganda isn't worth the time wasted.
I still subscribe to Science magazine.
That's a good way of looking at it.
I used to calculate it like this:
You pay a dollar premium to an insurance company. They take 15% or 20% of that off the top for administrative costs and profits (that's the item called "loss ratio" in their annual report). The doctor gets 80 cents, and he has to spend another 15 cents for administrative costs, so he's left with 65 cents of your premium dollar.
The funny thing is that most of that doesn't go to insurance company profits, it goes to administrative costs.
The other ways that the American health care system is more expensive than any others is doctor's income ($200,000/year for a general practitioner, $400,000/year or more for a specialist), over-treatment (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/health/doctors-and-hospitals/choosing-wisely/index.htm), and our heavy over-use of technology (we over-use CT scans so much that they're a significant cause of cancer http://www.consumerreports.org...).
1. Estimates of just medicare/medicaid fraud in the US easily approach $100 billion. I'd bet those estimates are conservative.
According to that link, the GAO estimated $48 billion in "improper payments." I suppose that's "approaching" $100 billion, if you are free to take any number and double it.
The GAO didn't say "fraud," they said "improper payments." Big difference.
The author of that article said that Medicare fraud is 10%, but private insurance fraud is only 1.5%. Funny thing, he used to work for the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, which is a private insurance industry lobbyist.
I went to a doctor about a bad knee. He gave me an x-ray, and billed the insurance company
$1,000. When I got home, I read a medical journal article about my knee problem. They said that x-rays aren't necessary. I wonder how much the private insurance industry loses to fraud. I'd like a calculation made by somebody who isn't a lobbyist for the private insurance industry.
Maybe if they got 9 women pregnant they could have had a baby in 1 month.
(Warning: Possibly anti-Semitic content)
http://www.evcomics.com/2012/0...
http://www.evcomics.com/2009/0...
Right. If somebody I know is playing, I'm interested.
Professional sports lose that.
It's as if, instead of going to church, you watched a mega-church on TV.
I guess I'm a nerd, I feel the same way.
I never really liked team sports. I'd rather ride a bicycle.
I do think I understand why people are into sports teams, though. It's a tribal ritual that seems to serve a function of group cohesiveness. I got that from reading the evolutionary biology stories in New Scientist and Science.
One judge says to another: "Be just. And if you can't be just, be arbitrary."
In 1964 a friend of mine was murdered in Mississippi by KKK members while trying to register black people to vote. So I don't think 1968 is that long ago.
We tend to welcome immigrants in this country, but I think they have an obligation to understand our values and learn our history.
The racism against black people in America was worse than the racism any other minority (and I say this after reading Korematsu and the Chinese Exclusion Act). That's a fact of American life and American history, a subject that you should learn more about.
Even today, if you follow Slashdot, you should have seen the story about the stop-and-frisk laws under Mayor Bloomberg. http://politics.slashdot.org/s... The testimony in that case, which was quoted in the judge's opinion, showed irrefutably that the cops were singling out black people to stop on the street, and illegally searching them, because they were black. In addition, this policy was approved and required by police supervisors all the way to the top. This resulted in marijuana arrests, and sometimes convictions, because the district attorney's office slowed down the cases when they tried to defend themselves in court. This didn't happen to white people.
This was clear evidence of discrimination against blacks, that continued until the end of Bloomberg's term on 31 December 2013.
I could go on and on with cases like this of discrimination against blacks.
You simply can't find discrimination like this against asians.
If evidence like this doesn't convince you, I don't know what will.
Sub-saharan black IQ test average is 70. Libtards dispute it may be as high as 80. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Right. You think you can create an IQ test which can validly compare people in the developed world to people in a continent that doesn't have free education.
How can you generate your own power? Oil-dependent generators are not cost efficient. Coal is large investment. Extract your own oil and refine it? Insanely complex and costly. Nuclear is impossible, politically tough.
The reason we are dependent on oil and coal is because corporations profit from it, they can monopolize it.
If you're a nation or corporation, you can think of safe nuclear, like thorium-based nuclear power.
Simple. In Atlas Shrugged, the creators and makers went off to Galt Gulch and created electric power out of the static electricity in the sky.
Once you drown government in a bathtub, anything can happen.