I've been told a lot of things, and I can't keep track of them all. I don't want the responsibility of being an informed patient. I want my doctor to make the important decisions. Health care is too important for me to take a chance on making a mistake.
That's not what happens, though. My insurance company sent me a post card to remind me to get my seasonal flu shot. I called my doctor's office and they didn't have them in yet. No coordination at all.
Public health decisions should be made by public health authorities. Unfortunately we have a very uncooperative society. The US Preventive Health Task Force recommends that breast cancer screening start at age 50, and they ran into a firestorm of people who were using or exploiting it to make political or philosophical points, or just to preserve a profitable income stream.
It would probably be good to get it bundled with your zoster shot, since zoster is fairly common among older people, it's quite painful, and it can often lead to permanent painful neuropathy.
This isn't something that I should worry about. My doctor should take care of it for me. I don't have time to read a stack of literature on every disease I might get. It would be like trying to watch every video on Youtube.
I went to a conference on vaccines several years ago where somebody gave a talk on whooping cough vaccine. He said that there was a problem with the vaccine made from the whole bacterial cell, and it did have a small number of adverse effects, not as bad as whooping cough itself but more common than the other standard vaccines. At that time they were working on a new acellular vaccine, which wouldn't have as many or as serious adverse effects.
Now they have it. That's the tradeoff. Fewer adverse effects but less effectiveness.
None of this is unproven. It's well proven. You can look it up in the textbooks.
If we didn't have so much resistance to vaccines in general, they could have gotten away with a more effective vaccine that had more common adverse effects. It would have been less comfortable but with fewer deaths.
When I was a chemistry student in high school, I could go down to the Lewis Chemical Supply on Canal Street in New York City and buy a pound of potassium chlorate. I can't buy potassium chlorate any more in New York City. Maybe it was because we had a few bombing incidents. I can't buy fireworks in New York City either.
There are places in the US where people (like the Boston Marathon bomber) can buy fireworks. There may be places where they can buy potassium chlorate. There used to be places where they could buy a ton of ammonium nitrate, no questions asked. Since the Oklahoma bombing, it's been a lot more difficult.
For other reasons, there are laws prohibiting the possession of materials needed to manufacture methamphetamines. The laws are vague and overbroad, and innocent law-abiding people have gotten their chemistry labs confiscated, but there are such laws.
The Reason-Rupe poll conducted live interviews with 1,003 adults on mobile (503) and landline (500) phones from May 9-13, 2013. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.7 percent. Princeton Survey Research Associates International executed the nationwide Reason-Rupe survey.
My statistics books are packed away, but I learned that if you have a binary, yes-no question, and a universe of 3 million people, a sample of about 1,000 responses will predict the belief of the 3 million people to an accuracy of 1% with a confidence of 95%.
If you want to get the responses of subgroups, i.e., how many women, how many black people, how many people aged 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, etc., how many people in different income categories (as market researchers often do), then you'd have to use a larger sample.
In medical studies, when they want to find out whether a drug works or not, 300 people in the treatment group and 300 people in the control group would be a good sample size. If they need to find out how well the drug works in different subgroups, they need a much larger sample. If they need to find out the frequency of rare events, they need a much larger sample.
If you don't leave your guns in your home accessible to your teenagers, they won't be able to use it to defend themselves if an intruder breaks in. If you do leave your guns accessible to teenagers, they are more likely to use it to commit suicide than anything else.
So when they talk storing your guns safely, what do they mean? Making it accessible to their teenagers or not?
There are laws banning people from manufacturing bombs.
I don't think I can go into a chemical supply house, buy a pound of potassium chlorate, and make a pipe bomb. If the cops found me with a pipe bomb in my trunk, they could prosecute me for a crime, couldn't they? You need a license to make fireworks, don't you?
The problem with personal responsibility is that there are a lot of people around with a friend or relative who was killed by a asshole with a gun.
They've decided that if you want to stop other people from being killed by assholes with guns, it's not effective to stop people from being assholes. They've decided that it is effective to stop assholes from getting guns. And the only way to stop assholes from getting guns is make it more difficult for everyone from getting guns.
I've shot guns myself, and I realize the cool factor in owning guns, but when you weigh that against the 40,000 or so gun deaths every year, it's not worth it.
You have to be really into guns to think it's worthwhile to have a friend die in order to have your guns, and most people aren't really into guns that much.
When I studied statistics and polling, I learned that a sample of 1,000 gave you answers that were reliable to a confidence interval of 1%. The Gallup poll and other polls use a nationwide sample of about 1,000.
There's no benefit to using more than 1,000 because they'd have to poll very large numbers of people for very small and meaningless improvements in the confidence interval. It doesn't make any difference whether 53%, 53.2% or 52.9% of Americans oppose printing guns at home.
Politicians don't say, "Well, I wouldn't worry about this if 52% of those polled opposed it, but now that 53% oppose it we have to do something about it."
Contractors are forcing their workers to work under dangerous conditions, and the contractors in turn are forced to do that if they want to meet the lowest bid of a free market.
I don't see how this is the result of government regulation. It's the result of a lack of government regulation, and a free market.
I don't see how individual contractors would change their conduct in a market way. In the 19th century, the law in the US said that workers assumed the risk of their job, and the employer wasn't responsible for their injuries. That's the free market you get without government interference. It required government interference, in the form of a state workers' compensation system, to make the employer more financially responsible for worker injuries. It required government interference in the form of sending OSHA inspectors to the workplace to get the employer to adopt safer work practices.
Look at a country that has no effective government regulation of workplace safety, like India. Indian workers are working in even worse conditions, and they pay even less regard to safety. There are Indian companies that break down ships for scrap, and they have workers working barefoot on beaches.
I've studied state and federal OSHA regulations, and I've talked to OSHA regulators and the businessmen they regulate. OSHA did a pretty good job -- much better than most of the unregulated businesses did on their own. For example, California OSHA found out that a lot of workers were getting electrocuted from a new kind of boom truck, so they changed the design of the truck and improved worker training. Ronald Reagan shut down California OSHA.
The problem with OSHA is that the anti-regulatory conservatives (mostly Republican but also Democratic) cut OSHA's budget, which cut the number of inspectors and analysts who studied workplace safety to identify the problems. As a result, OSHA has been less effective in solving these widespread problems. We have guards at stores to stop theft, but we don't have OSHA inspectors at work sites to stop injuries. That's what conservatives do: they cut OSHA's budget and then complain OSHA is ineffective.
The few businesses that adopted good safety regulations without the government forcing them to do it were working in a monopoly, where they could afford to incur the costs of doing things safely, because their competitors weren't driving their prices down. Even so, all the examples I can think of, like the aircraft industry or the nuclear industry, were heavily regulated monopolies.
I've talked to corporate executives. Their biggest problem isn't taxes. It's sales. If they sold enough, profitably enough, they could easily pay taxes.
Taxes might be significant if you had many companies manufacturing commodities with hairline profits.
That's what economic theory teaches. Reality is more complicated.
Here's reality: Suppose I'm a contractor with a bunch of construction workers digging trenches. Now trench collapses are a major cause of workplace deaths. You prevent trench collapses by shoring up the sides of the trenches if they get too deep or the soil is too damp. It takes longer to shore up the sides, so it takes longer and costs more to do the job safely. If the trench collapses, and kills a few workers, it doesn't cost the contractor anything, because it's a worker's compensation case, which means the state pays (and doesn't pay much), and these businesses are run as corporations, so the contractor simply goes bankrupt and starts a new corporation.
Most contractors don't shore up the sides of the trenches. They can bid low for these jobs. If a contractor were to shore up the sides of the trenches, it would cost him more, he'd have to bid more, and he wouldn't get the job.
So the result of competition in the free market is for contractors to run their businesses in a way that kills their employees. Because unemployment is so high, they can always get more employees, who are desperate for work and willing to face the risk of death.
And that's the race to the bottom.
(OSHA can't stop it because they they don't have enough inspectors. They'd need a thousand times as many inspectors to visit all these small sites.)
3. Because when companies get tax breaks, the local governments don't get tax revenue to run schools to educate the employees that the companies will need. That's why we don't have the technology-savvy employees the companies want (among other reasons).
The two best sources for the number of deaths in Iraq are a study published in The Lancet, which estimated 650,000 deaths, to 2006, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which estimated 150,000 deaths. The best evidence-based estimate is that it's somewhere in between those two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Both studies were done by investigators who had done these war estimates before, and actually went to Iraq to poll people in the field.
That's not true of the Iraq Body Count, which was put together by some anonymous guys who stayed home clipping English language newspapers. They make the dubious assumption that every death was reported in the newspaper and reprinted in an English language newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been told a lot of things, and I can't keep track of them all. I don't want the responsibility of being an informed patient. I want my doctor to make the important decisions. Health care is too important for me to take a chance on making a mistake.
That's not what happens, though. My insurance company sent me a post card to remind me to get my seasonal flu shot. I called my doctor's office and they didn't have them in yet. No coordination at all.
Public health decisions should be made by public health authorities. Unfortunately we have a very uncooperative society. The US Preventive Health Task Force recommends that breast cancer screening start at age 50, and they ran into a firestorm of people who were using or exploiting it to make political or philosophical points, or just to preserve a profitable income stream.
It would probably be good to get it bundled with your zoster shot, since zoster is fairly common among older people, it's quite painful, and it can often lead to permanent painful neuropathy.
This isn't something that I should worry about. My doctor should take care of it for me. I don't have time to read a stack of literature on every disease I might get. It would be like trying to watch every video on Youtube.
I went to a conference on vaccines several years ago where somebody gave a talk on whooping cough vaccine. He said that there was a problem with the vaccine made from the whole bacterial cell, and it did have a small number of adverse effects, not as bad as whooping cough itself but more common than the other standard vaccines. At that time they were working on a new acellular vaccine, which wouldn't have as many or as serious adverse effects.
Now they have it. That's the tradeoff. Fewer adverse effects but less effectiveness.
None of this is unproven. It's well proven. You can look it up in the textbooks.
If we didn't have so much resistance to vaccines in general, they could have gotten away with a more effective vaccine that had more common adverse effects. It would have been less comfortable but with fewer deaths.
The utility of cars is far greater than the utility of guns. So is the utility of doctors.
I said nationwide.
When I was a chemistry student in high school, I could go down to the Lewis Chemical Supply on Canal Street in New York City and buy a pound of potassium chlorate. I can't buy potassium chlorate any more in New York City. Maybe it was because we had a few bombing incidents. I can't buy fireworks in New York City either.
There are places in the US where people (like the Boston Marathon bomber) can buy fireworks. There may be places where they can buy potassium chlorate. There used to be places where they could buy a ton of ammonium nitrate, no questions asked. Since the Oklahoma bombing, it's been a lot more difficult.
For other reasons, there are laws prohibiting the possession of materials needed to manufacture methamphetamines. The laws are vague and overbroad, and innocent law-abiding people have gotten their chemistry labs confiscated, but there are such laws.
Answering your question about does right to bear arm worth 40000 lives. My answer to this is yes.
My answer is no.
http://reason.com/poll/2013/05/17/reason-rupe-may-2013-national-survey
The Reason-Rupe poll conducted live interviews with 1,003 adults on mobile (503) and landline (500) phones from May 9-13, 2013. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 3.7 percent. Princeton Survey Research Associates International executed the nationwide Reason-Rupe survey.
My statistics books are packed away, but I learned that if you have a binary, yes-no question, and a universe of 3 million people, a sample of about 1,000 responses will predict the belief of the 3 million people to an accuracy of 1% with a confidence of 95%.
If you want to get the responses of subgroups, i.e., how many women, how many black people, how many people aged 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, etc., how many people in different income categories (as market researchers often do), then you'd have to use a larger sample.
In medical studies, when they want to find out whether a drug works or not, 300 people in the treatment group and 300 people in the control group would be a good sample size. If they need to find out how well the drug works in different subgroups, they need a much larger sample. If they need to find out the frequency of rare events, they need a much larger sample.
There are 10 kinds of people who read Slashdot: Those who understand basic statistics and those who don't.
George Gallup and the other professional pollsters use a nationwide sample of about 1,000. It gives you an accuracy of 1% for a yes-no question.
There are limitations to polling but a sample of 1,000 isn't one of them.
Because you can write a law against having a gun. You can't write a law against being an asshole.
That's the dilemma of being a gun owner.
If you don't leave your guns in your home accessible to your teenagers, they won't be able to use it to defend themselves if an intruder breaks in. If you do leave your guns accessible to teenagers, they are more likely to use it to commit suicide than anything else.
So when they talk storing your guns safely, what do they mean? Making it accessible to their teenagers or not?
There are laws banning people from manufacturing bombs.
I don't think I can go into a chemical supply house, buy a pound of potassium chlorate, and make a pipe bomb. If the cops found me with a pipe bomb in my trunk, they could prosecute me for a crime, couldn't they? You need a license to make fireworks, don't you?
If someone kills my friend with a gun, how is it any consolation to me that it was the killer's personal responsibility?
The problem with personal responsibility is that there are a lot of people around with a friend or relative who was killed by a asshole with a gun.
They've decided that if you want to stop other people from being killed by assholes with guns, it's not effective to stop people from being assholes. They've decided that it is effective to stop assholes from getting guns. And the only way to stop assholes from getting guns is make it more difficult for everyone from getting guns.
I've shot guns myself, and I realize the cool factor in owning guns, but when you weigh that against the 40,000 or so gun deaths every year, it's not worth it.
You have to be really into guns to think it's worthwhile to have a friend die in order to have your guns, and most people aren't really into guns that much.
When I studied statistics and polling, I learned that a sample of 1,000 gave you answers that were reliable to a confidence interval of 1%. The Gallup poll and other polls use a nationwide sample of about 1,000.
There's no benefit to using more than 1,000 because they'd have to poll very large numbers of people for very small and meaningless improvements in the confidence interval. It doesn't make any difference whether 53%, 53.2% or 52.9% of Americans oppose printing guns at home.
Politicians don't say, "Well, I wouldn't worry about this if 52% of those polled opposed it, but now that 53% oppose it we have to do something about it."
I was hoping you had some evidence to support it besides your own strongly-held opinion and sweeping generalizations.
Don't blame me, blame the guy who said that competition keeps markets efficient, prices low, and makes people better off over time.
Contractors are forcing their workers to work under dangerous conditions, and the contractors in turn are forced to do that if they want to meet the lowest bid of a free market.
I don't see how this is the result of government regulation. It's the result of a lack of government regulation, and a free market.
I don't see how individual contractors would change their conduct in a market way. In the 19th century, the law in the US said that workers assumed the risk of their job, and the employer wasn't responsible for their injuries. That's the free market you get without government interference. It required government interference, in the form of a state workers' compensation system, to make the employer more financially responsible for worker injuries. It required government interference in the form of sending OSHA inspectors to the workplace to get the employer to adopt safer work practices.
Look at a country that has no effective government regulation of workplace safety, like India. Indian workers are working in even worse conditions, and they pay even less regard to safety. There are Indian companies that break down ships for scrap, and they have workers working barefoot on beaches.
I've studied state and federal OSHA regulations, and I've talked to OSHA regulators and the businessmen they regulate. OSHA did a pretty good job -- much better than most of the unregulated businesses did on their own. For example, California OSHA found out that a lot of workers were getting electrocuted from a new kind of boom truck, so they changed the design of the truck and improved worker training. Ronald Reagan shut down California OSHA.
The problem with OSHA is that the anti-regulatory conservatives (mostly Republican but also Democratic) cut OSHA's budget, which cut the number of inspectors and analysts who studied workplace safety to identify the problems. As a result, OSHA has been less effective in solving these widespread problems. We have guards at stores to stop theft, but we don't have OSHA inspectors at work sites to stop injuries. That's what conservatives do: they cut OSHA's budget and then complain OSHA is ineffective.
The few businesses that adopted good safety regulations without the government forcing them to do it were working in a monopoly, where they could afford to incur the costs of doing things safely, because their competitors weren't driving their prices down. Even so, all the examples I can think of, like the aircraft industry or the nuclear industry, were heavily regulated monopolies.
Well played. I can't figure out whether you're pretending to be a Randie or really are one.
I've talked to corporate executives. Their biggest problem isn't taxes. It's sales. If they sold enough, profitably enough, they could easily pay taxes.
Taxes might be significant if you had many companies manufacturing commodities with hairline profits.
That's what economic theory teaches. Reality is more complicated.
Here's reality: Suppose I'm a contractor with a bunch of construction workers digging trenches. Now trench collapses are a major cause of workplace deaths. You prevent trench collapses by shoring up the sides of the trenches if they get too deep or the soil is too damp. It takes longer to shore up the sides, so it takes longer and costs more to do the job safely. If the trench collapses, and kills a few workers, it doesn't cost the contractor anything, because it's a worker's compensation case, which means the state pays (and doesn't pay much), and these businesses are run as corporations, so the contractor simply goes bankrupt and starts a new corporation.
Most contractors don't shore up the sides of the trenches. They can bid low for these jobs. If a contractor were to shore up the sides of the trenches, it would cost him more, he'd have to bid more, and he wouldn't get the job.
So the result of competition in the free market is for contractors to run their businesses in a way that kills their employees. Because unemployment is so high, they can always get more employees, who are desperate for work and willing to face the risk of death.
And that's the race to the bottom.
(OSHA can't stop it because they they don't have enough inspectors. They'd need a thousand times as many inspectors to visit all these small sites.)
3. Because when companies get tax breaks, the local governments don't get tax revenue to run schools to educate the employees that the companies will need. That's why we don't have the technology-savvy employees the companies want (among other reasons).
The two best sources for the number of deaths in Iraq are a study published in The Lancet, which estimated 650,000 deaths, to 2006, and a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which estimated 150,000 deaths. The best evidence-based estimate is that it's somewhere in between those two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
Both studies were done by investigators who had done these war estimates before, and actually went to Iraq to poll people in the field.
That's not true of the Iraq Body Count, which was put together by some anonymous guys who stayed home clipping English language newspapers. They make the dubious assumption that every death was reported in the newspaper and reprinted in an English language newspaper.
Since you want to get the facts straight.