Thank you for an enjoyable half hour wandering through your website. You're a total nutter, but it pleased me to see that my Internet Kook detectors are properly calibrated.
All sources I have read indicate that it is only "safe in the allowable doses." You may as well try to say that secondhand smoke is safe in allowable doses.
So let me understand this: Everything you've seen tells you that there are safe levels of exposure to mercury, but you think they're all wrong. Okay. The fact that mercury isn't secondhand smoke makes your analogy irrelevant, as does the fact that I didn't make the argument you're suggesting, and the fact that numerous public health authorities have come forward to say that there are no safe allowable doses of secondhand smoke. So: no safe allowable exposure to secondhand smoke--ban on smoking in public. Safe allowable doses of mercury: no problem with the vaccine.
I would add to this the fact that there was less mercury in a single dose of MMR vaccine than there is in a single can of tuna or a nice tuna steak.
Autism's diagnosis is nebulous, and the rise in cases is almost certainly due in large part to its status as a catch-all.
Even if autism were overdiagnosed (and I agree it is), if you remove an actual causal or contributory agent of autism, you should still see a change in the incidence of autism. If 100,000 cases are diagnosed every year, of which only 50,000 are correct diagnoses, and you remove a causal agent, then there should still be a measurable drop in the actual cases, with a proportional drop in the overall number of cases. But no drop has been found, especially among the children who didn't receive the MMR vaccine. The only way you can reasonably argue that removing a causal agent wouldn't show any drop in the incidence, is if all diagnoses of autism are wrong.
The removal of mercury, regardless of its ultimate validity, was clearly something that could be achieved without having to bend over backwards.
And it was, and there was no apparent impact on autism generally.
Finally, your last point, in which you place me on a pedestal next to murderers.
I don't consider you a murderer. I consider you to be akin to someone standing in the crowd of a lynch mob. You're not handling the rope yourself, but surely you can see how you're contributing.
Do I sound like I am part of a hysteria?
Yes, you do, albeit with the same delicacy as a concern troll. You're not accusing big pharma of anything, you're just dismissing what, in your words, everyone is telling you about the safety of mercury in medicines.
I'd ask for an apology, but I judge you ill-capable of such courtesy.
I'm very capable of issuing an apology; I strongly believe in doing so when appropriate. I have no intention of apologizing to you. You reject all reputable evidence and basic science where this topic is concerned, and take health advice from alternative medicine outlets pushing algae cures. By standing with the mob, you contribute to the consequences of the mob's actions, which are that children die and go blind from diseases easily preventable by vaccination. Your presence in the mob contributes to the apparent credibility of it. I know someone with a baby who actually said to me "so many people think that vaccines are bad--there's got to be something to it."
The findings have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked by other reputable papers over more than a decade and studying millions of children. There is no link between mercury in vaccines and autism, or vaccines generally and autism. In your ignorance, you are denying the scientific equivalent of the sky being blue.
The mercury in vaccines was a mercury compound that has been repeatedly demonstrated over decades to have no harmful effects. Pure mercury is harmful. Certain compounds are deadly. The compound in thimerasol is not.
But most damning to your brand of ignorance is the fact that autism diagnoses continued to rise at the same steady rate for more than a decade after thimerasol was no longer used in the MMR vaccine. The removal of all mercury from vaccines due to the bogus paper by Wakefield had zero impact on the rate of autism diagnoses. Likewise, the statistically significant drops in the numbers of people getting the vaccine for their children had no effect on the rate of diagnoses. There is no demonstrable link between mercury, vaccines, and autism; there is a demonstrable absence of a link where there should be one, if they were causally related.
I would apologize for being harsh, but the ignorance you demonstrate has caused children to die. Measles epidemics that were a thing of the past before the vaccine hysteria have come back, and left children blind, or dead. Your ignorance is actively harmful to the rest of us.
If the person on the Internet is pointing you to something in one of the world's most respected medical journals, shouldn't the journals qualifications be the deciding factor?
The crucial point you're missing about Microsoft vs. Apple is that MS is a convicted monopolist while Apple is not. When a monopolist bundles a product with their monopoly product, it's an antitrust violation because they're extending their monopoly; if MS wasn't a convicted monopolist, they'd have had no problem at all bundling IE, or allowing only software sold through the online MS store to work on their OS. If you don't have a monopoly, bundling (or otherwise limiting access to) your product is not a violation of antitrust law. You're simply wrong about how antitrust law applies in this case.
But this is precisely why government regulations around this type of thing exist.
No such regulations exist. Antitrust law governs monopolies and prevents collusion. It's silent in a competitive marketplace (and no, the marketplace is not defined as "iPhones and iPads").
In 30+ years no one has built a nuclear power plant in the United States. Isn't the free market saying something?
No. After the Three Mile Island incident, regulatory barricades essentially stopped the development of new nuclear plants in the U.S., almost killing the industry.
Yeah, you're demonstrating more about your own issues than you are accurate about mine.
Clearly you feel it would be better if they know the "etiquette or the language" of the larger society.
Regardless of how you feel about it, knowing it generally makes day-to-day life easier.
They are strangers in their own lands by your viewpoint.
To a degree this is true, and it's a disservice done to them by their parents.
it quite clear from your writing the contempt you have for those who do not conform to your view of the world.
I'm not contemptuous of them. I feel sympathy for them. Their parent's misguided efforts to shelter them from the world accomplish nothing but delaying them learning to deal with it and find their own way. If I were going to be parachuted into France through no decision of my own, I'd appreciate the people flying the plane to teach me French first.
Your contempt, otoh, is obvious:
I would like to see more people be free thinkers and not bob their heads like lemmings. Maybe we would have a better society if we did.
Gotcha. If you're not a radical free thinker who marches to his own drum and challenges the straitjacket of "society", you're a lemming to be blamed for the poor condition of our culture and are fated to die pointlessly en masse. There is, of course, no middle ground where someone who superficially gets along well with the world as it is, is also an interesting or original thinker with their own compelling story to tell.
But that's not really fair, is it? It's as much a mischaracterization of your views as calling mine "contemptuous" and assuming that I look down on these kids, isn't it?
Where did I say that being weird should be a thoughtcrime? Where did I make an argument that they'd turn out better in public school?
However, I'll make one now: when weird parents shield their children from the rest of the world by homeschooling them, not to give them a better education but to protect their own weirdness, you're doing a disservice to your children because you're adding difficulties to their lives in getting along in the world. There's a reason that polygamist splinter factions of the Mormon church don't send their children to public schools, and it's not to shield them from being teased.
No matter how wrong you think the world is, you still have to live in it, and so do your children. If your particular brand of weirdness can't stand being evaluated by your children against the "normalcy" they see in school, then maybe ur doin' it wrong.
The thing about the weird homeschooled kids (as opposed to the normal ones who someone below observed don't get pegged as homeschooled) is that they're weird in completely new ways. Nerds and geeks are weird in a subculture way, and may get picked on for that group membership. The noticeably homeschooled kids are like visitors from another country who don't understand the etiquette or the language.
Virtually no exploration either by unmanned or manned approaches. Decades long delays in following up on important observations in the Mars program. No exploration of the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo missions
The shuttle is to blame for this. The constant lament of the guys pushing unmanned missions is that the manned stuff eats up 90% of NASA's budget, leaving them to fight over the scraps. If NASA had the same budget and no Shuttle or ISS sucking up its dollars to explore how to do the Shuttle and the ISS, you'd see tons of excellent science done by probes.
the work of a single serious manned mission to Mars (including a stay of two years).
Almost all the effort and expense in such a mission would be spent on simply carrying out the mission--getting them there, keeping them there, and bringing them home. And at the end of two years, I highly doubt they'd have done better science than if that money were spent on Mars probes like Spirit.
But they're unusual. Most stuff is like the Hubble telescope. You could have several functioning space telescopes for the price of one Hubble telescope and its repair missions.
I think you're making my point for me here:)
What will drive the price to orbit down? My view is that is purely economic. Launch frequency will do the trick. But where's the volume going to come from?
Getting rid of manned exploration and switching to unmanned programs. For the cost of a shuttle launch you can send ten or twenty probes up. On a single mission basis, manned might be able to do more science (though its doubtful given how well the Mars Rovers did), but if you can do 20 targeted unmanned missions for every single manned mission, then you'll get a lot more science out of the unmanned program. You'll get the volume of launches to make them economical, and you'll also advance robotics far faster.
I think that you severely overestimate the amount of science that can be done by an astronaut. They operate in such a severely constrained environment that the only experiments they can carry out are set-piece experiments arranged on the ground before launch. The sort of free-form science that you seem to be imagining, where scientists live on Mars for two years in a relatively useful lab environment, is a very expensive pipe dream that's simply out of our reach right now. The way to bring it into reach is to advance the art of space exploration through unmanned technology. IMHO.
You're right that no one sees the home schooled kids who aren't messed up, just because they're not messed up and people assume they had a normal upbringing. But home schooled kids often turn out weird because their parents home schooled them for political, rather than educational reasons, and those are the ones who get noticed and put the face on home schooling.
My girlfriend teaches high school, and the "noticeably home schooled" kids are definitely weird (they come to her school for particular courses sometimes) just because their weird parents gave them a weird home schooling experience.
Ideally, home schooling is far superior to institutional schooling. The problem is that home schoolers are often people who are pulling their kids out of a school system that they see corrupting their children. It's not about more individual attention, it's about withdrawing from an evil society so their kids can get baked in their own oven. Christian fundamentalists, right wing militia types, granola crunching hippies--these are the face of the home school movement, and it's justifiable to wonder whether it's in the kids best interest to home school the kids for political rather than educational reasons.
My girlfriend is a high school teacher who runs into home schooled kids attending her school for certain classes, and she says that, typically, they're weird kids who've obviously spent too much time in a weird home environment and lack enough socialization to get along well once they're back in the public sphere. That's the danger of home schooling.
Well, no, it doesn't, at least at first. Sending people into space increases the mass to be sent into space by orders of magnitude (and reduces the useful things that can be done). Our current limitation on sending anything into space is the cost per kilogram, which is really high because we're still using chemical rockets--so put dev dollars into new engines. The problems of having people in space (an enclosed capsule, bags to poop in and food in a tube) are trivial and mostly solved here on earth in other fields.
Wait until it's cheap to send anything into space, and it'll be cheap to send humans into space.
Human colonization of space is a worthy goal, and worthier if done privately, but here's thing: It's better to do it incrementally by sending probes, by learning about operating in space, and by developing the technologies to send people into space economically. Starting with sending men into space is like getting your iron age civilization to build a car. You could probably do it if you threw enough resources at it, but you're better off developing the cotton loom first and letting motor come in their time.
Awesome. Let the Chinese and the Russians go broke putting people somewhere that's pointless and expensive. They'll have the secret of making perfect ball bearings in zero gravity, it's true, but we'll have working fusion reactors.
A friend of mine was, at 29, a 10 year veteran of EA and in team management position. He left when his boss met him coming in one morning and said "Hey! Look, we redid your office! Isn't it awesome? Look, the couch folds out into a bed!" He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.
There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.
As you so ably illustrate with your borked link, it's the hypocrisy of it, since men were (and are, here on./) largely oblivious to sexism directed at women.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for an enjoyable half hour wandering through your website. You're a total nutter, but it pleased me to see that my Internet Kook detectors are properly calibrated.
I honestly can't tell whether you're being sincere or ironic.
So let me understand this: Everything you've seen tells you that there are safe levels of exposure to mercury, but you think they're all wrong. Okay. The fact that mercury isn't secondhand smoke makes your analogy irrelevant, as does the fact that I didn't make the argument you're suggesting, and the fact that numerous public health authorities have come forward to say that there are no safe allowable doses of secondhand smoke. So: no safe allowable exposure to secondhand smoke--ban on smoking in public. Safe allowable doses of mercury: no problem with the vaccine.
I would add to this the fact that there was less mercury in a single dose of MMR vaccine than there is in a single can of tuna or a nice tuna steak.
Even if autism were overdiagnosed (and I agree it is), if you remove an actual causal or contributory agent of autism, you should still see a change in the incidence of autism. If 100,000 cases are diagnosed every year, of which only 50,000 are correct diagnoses, and you remove a causal agent, then there should still be a measurable drop in the actual cases, with a proportional drop in the overall number of cases. But no drop has been found, especially among the children who didn't receive the MMR vaccine. The only way you can reasonably argue that removing a causal agent wouldn't show any drop in the incidence, is if all diagnoses of autism are wrong.
And it was, and there was no apparent impact on autism generally.
I don't consider you a murderer. I consider you to be akin to someone standing in the crowd of a lynch mob. You're not handling the rope yourself, but surely you can see how you're contributing.
Yes, you do, albeit with the same delicacy as a concern troll. You're not accusing big pharma of anything, you're just dismissing what, in your words, everyone is telling you about the safety of mercury in medicines.
I'm very capable of issuing an apology; I strongly believe in doing so when appropriate. I have no intention of apologizing to you. You reject all reputable evidence and basic science where this topic is concerned, and take health advice from alternative medicine outlets pushing algae cures. By standing with the mob, you contribute to the consequences of the mob's actions, which are that children die and go blind from diseases easily preventable by vaccination. Your presence in the mob contributes to the apparent credibility of it. I know someone with a baby who actually said to me "so many people think that vaccines are bad--there's got to be something to it."
The findings have been repeatedly, exhaustively debunked by other reputable papers over more than a decade and studying millions of children. There is no link between mercury in vaccines and autism, or vaccines generally and autism. In your ignorance, you are denying the scientific equivalent of the sky being blue.
You're ignorant.
The mercury in vaccines was a mercury compound that has been repeatedly demonstrated over decades to have no harmful effects. Pure mercury is harmful. Certain compounds are deadly. The compound in thimerasol is not.
But most damning to your brand of ignorance is the fact that autism diagnoses continued to rise at the same steady rate for more than a decade after thimerasol was no longer used in the MMR vaccine. The removal of all mercury from vaccines due to the bogus paper by Wakefield had zero impact on the rate of autism diagnoses. Likewise, the statistically significant drops in the numbers of people getting the vaccine for their children had no effect on the rate of diagnoses. There is no demonstrable link between mercury, vaccines, and autism; there is a demonstrable absence of a link where there should be one, if they were causally related.
I would apologize for being harsh, but the ignorance you demonstrate has caused children to die. Measles epidemics that were a thing of the past before the vaccine hysteria have come back, and left children blind, or dead. Your ignorance is actively harmful to the rest of us.
Wouldn't you?
You're right--the Lancet is still quite bullish on the variety of studies that disprove Wakefield's work.
If the person on the Internet is pointing you to something in one of the world's most respected medical journals, shouldn't the journals qualifications be the deciding factor?
The crucial point you're missing about Microsoft vs. Apple is that MS is a convicted monopolist while Apple is not. When a monopolist bundles a product with their monopoly product, it's an antitrust violation because they're extending their monopoly; if MS wasn't a convicted monopolist, they'd have had no problem at all bundling IE, or allowing only software sold through the online MS store to work on their OS. If you don't have a monopoly, bundling (or otherwise limiting access to) your product is not a violation of antitrust law. You're simply wrong about how antitrust law applies in this case.
No such regulations exist. Antitrust law governs monopolies and prevents collusion. It's silent in a competitive marketplace (and no, the marketplace is not defined as "iPhones and iPads").
Why is profit the wrong reason to lock things down?
If you don't like it, don't buy it. You act like you're owed an unlocked product. You're not. Antitrust has nothing to do with it.
No. After the Three Mile Island incident, regulatory barricades essentially stopped the development of new nuclear plants in the U.S., almost killing the industry.
Yeah, you're demonstrating more about your own issues than you are accurate about mine.
Regardless of how you feel about it, knowing it generally makes day-to-day life easier.
To a degree this is true, and it's a disservice done to them by their parents.
I'm not contemptuous of them. I feel sympathy for them. Their parent's misguided efforts to shelter them from the world accomplish nothing but delaying them learning to deal with it and find their own way. If I were going to be parachuted into France through no decision of my own, I'd appreciate the people flying the plane to teach me French first.
Your contempt, otoh, is obvious:
Gotcha. If you're not a radical free thinker who marches to his own drum and challenges the straitjacket of "society", you're a lemming to be blamed for the poor condition of our culture and are fated to die pointlessly en masse. There is, of course, no middle ground where someone who superficially gets along well with the world as it is, is also an interesting or original thinker with their own compelling story to tell.
But that's not really fair, is it? It's as much a mischaracterization of your views as calling mine "contemptuous" and assuming that I look down on these kids, isn't it?
Indeed.
Where did I say that being weird should be a thoughtcrime? Where did I make an argument that they'd turn out better in public school?
However, I'll make one now: when weird parents shield their children from the rest of the world by homeschooling them, not to give them a better education but to protect their own weirdness, you're doing a disservice to your children because you're adding difficulties to their lives in getting along in the world. There's a reason that polygamist splinter factions of the Mormon church don't send their children to public schools, and it's not to shield them from being teased.
No matter how wrong you think the world is, you still have to live in it, and so do your children. If your particular brand of weirdness can't stand being evaluated by your children against the "normalcy" they see in school, then maybe ur doin' it wrong.
The thing about the weird homeschooled kids (as opposed to the normal ones who someone below observed don't get pegged as homeschooled) is that they're weird in completely new ways. Nerds and geeks are weird in a subculture way, and may get picked on for that group membership. The noticeably homeschooled kids are like visitors from another country who don't understand the etiquette or the language.
The shuttle is to blame for this. The constant lament of the guys pushing unmanned missions is that the manned stuff eats up 90% of NASA's budget, leaving them to fight over the scraps. If NASA had the same budget and no Shuttle or ISS sucking up its dollars to explore how to do the Shuttle and the ISS, you'd see tons of excellent science done by probes.
Almost all the effort and expense in such a mission would be spent on simply carrying out the mission--getting them there, keeping them there, and bringing them home. And at the end of two years, I highly doubt they'd have done better science than if that money were spent on Mars probes like Spirit.
I think you're making my point for me here :)
Getting rid of manned exploration and switching to unmanned programs. For the cost of a shuttle launch you can send ten or twenty probes up. On a single mission basis, manned might be able to do more science (though its doubtful given how well the Mars Rovers did), but if you can do 20 targeted unmanned missions for every single manned mission, then you'll get a lot more science out of the unmanned program. You'll get the volume of launches to make them economical, and you'll also advance robotics far faster.
I think that you severely overestimate the amount of science that can be done by an astronaut. They operate in such a severely constrained environment that the only experiments they can carry out are set-piece experiments arranged on the ground before launch. The sort of free-form science that you seem to be imagining, where scientists live on Mars for two years in a relatively useful lab environment, is a very expensive pipe dream that's simply out of our reach right now. The way to bring it into reach is to advance the art of space exploration through unmanned technology. IMHO.
You're right that no one sees the home schooled kids who aren't messed up, just because they're not messed up and people assume they had a normal upbringing. But home schooled kids often turn out weird because their parents home schooled them for political, rather than educational reasons, and those are the ones who get noticed and put the face on home schooling.
My girlfriend teaches high school, and the "noticeably home schooled" kids are definitely weird (they come to her school for particular courses sometimes) just because their weird parents gave them a weird home schooling experience.
Ideally, home schooling is far superior to institutional schooling. The problem is that home schoolers are often people who are pulling their kids out of a school system that they see corrupting their children. It's not about more individual attention, it's about withdrawing from an evil society so their kids can get baked in their own oven. Christian fundamentalists, right wing militia types, granola crunching hippies--these are the face of the home school movement, and it's justifiable to wonder whether it's in the kids best interest to home school the kids for political rather than educational reasons.
My girlfriend is a high school teacher who runs into home schooled kids attending her school for certain classes, and she says that, typically, they're weird kids who've obviously spent too much time in a weird home environment and lack enough socialization to get along well once they're back in the public sphere. That's the danger of home schooling.
Well, no, it doesn't, at least at first. Sending people into space increases the mass to be sent into space by orders of magnitude (and reduces the useful things that can be done). Our current limitation on sending anything into space is the cost per kilogram, which is really high because we're still using chemical rockets--so put dev dollars into new engines. The problems of having people in space (an enclosed capsule, bags to poop in and food in a tube) are trivial and mostly solved here on earth in other fields.
Wait until it's cheap to send anything into space, and it'll be cheap to send humans into space.
Human colonization of space is a worthy goal, and worthier if done privately, but here's thing: It's better to do it incrementally by sending probes, by learning about operating in space, and by developing the technologies to send people into space economically. Starting with sending men into space is like getting your iron age civilization to build a car. You could probably do it if you threw enough resources at it, but you're better off developing the cotton loom first and letting motor come in their time.
Awesome. Let the Chinese and the Russians go broke putting people somewhere that's pointless and expensive. They'll have the secret of making perfect ball bearings in zero gravity, it's true, but we'll have working fusion reactors.
The problem is the hosting is in the U.S. Like it or not, that gives the U.S. government leverage to enforce its laws on the organization.
Push sf.net to move to offshore hosting. As long as its servers are in the U.S., sf cannot expect to win a fight with the U.S. gov't.
A friend of mine was, at 29, a 10 year veteran of EA and in team management position. He left when his boss met him coming in one morning and said "Hey! Look, we redid your office! Isn't it awesome? Look, the couch folds out into a bed!" He said this sort of thing was well understood at EA to mean that he wasn't spending enough time in the office, and quit.
There's a reason EA and Rockstar take young 20 year olds just out of school, and expect them to be gone by 30. Kids buy into the myth of 'work hard, play hard', don't know what quality of life is, and haven't yet had a shitty work experience to stand up for themselves.
Thank you for illustrating my point.
As you so ably illustrate with your borked link, it's the hypocrisy of it, since men were (and are, here on ./) largely oblivious to sexism directed at women.