In a parallel universe, this question was asked on slashart: "why is it that art history majors need Calculus to be well rounded but engineering majors don't need to take 17th Century Baroque Masters for the same reason?"
...blah blah boilerplate rant about the evils of single-source technology blah blah blah...ok, now let me rant about educators using my oversimplified knowledge of the education system based primarily on anecdote, truthy statements offered by 'they', and presumably a dash of personal experience...
The problem with education is not that teachers don't have access to computers but that if you gave those teachers access to everything they wouldn't know what to do with it.
If you want to get kids knowledgeable and excited about technology then you need teachers that are knowledgeable and excited about technology. Most aren't. Most are liberal arts majors that think the internet is facebook.
Because of licensing requirements, most teachers were probably education majors with an emphasis on their subject area, not pure 'liberal arts' majors. Regardless, the internet has been around long enough younger teachers are probably as savvy with internet usage as any other millennial, while older teachers were using the internet before Facebook let them register with the site.
Your school needs some help? Hire some CS majors. Why is this rocket science for people?
If we wanted to teach our kids how to play a musical instrument, would it not be obvious that the teacher would themselves have to know how to play? Obviously.
Yet how many teachers presumed to be able to teach technology are actually knowledgable about technology?
Exactly.
Exactly what? You have given exactly no data regarding the technology expertise of elementary or secondary teachers. You have just assumed we all think teachers are idiots who can't possibly be as smart as a CS major, because if there's one thing I've learned about CS majors in my time on Slashdot is that clearly they know everything about everything...just ask them!
In fact, many schools now hire technology specialists who not only help teachers use technology appropriately in the classroom, they can also teach students how to use technology. In elementary grades, this position works just like a music or art teacher. In upper grades, they may have their own specialty classes, again, like the music and art teachers, where technology is the focus. Other than that, if my kid is in an English composition class, I want him to be able to focus on researching a topic and then writing well about the subject, using the tools that are most appropriate for the task, not getting a CS lecture on logic gates or learning how to write his own word processor.
[snip]...The entire teacher hiring process has to be reviewed.
The teaching profession is not attracting the right people. Here someone will say "they're not paid enough money"... Yes and no. Some of them are not paid enough and some of them are paid far too much. Part of the issue is that the teachers want to be paid based on seniority rather on the actual quality of their work or on whether their skills as a teacher are actually in demand. So a PE coach that has been working at a school for many years expects to be paid more than a new science teacher that is actually hard to attract.
Wrong way to do it. You pay people according to how hard they are to attract. People that are really easy to get are paid less. People that are harder to get are paid more. Added to that, you reward teachers that are good at their jobs while generally paying the crappy ones what you think they're worth... which might be not a lot...[snip]
Frankly, there's more to being a good teacher - particularly in the younger grades - than just subject knowledge. If you think it's all babysitting and giving busywork, then I can see why you think some (non-science) teachers are overpaid. Teachers are not only responsible for having subject knowledge, they are responsible for: imparting that knowledge to 20-30 different learners at a time; keeping those students on task and progressing; constantly evaluating if
I said that in 5 years CSS will be at the point where the elimination of the main pain points are supported widely enough to be able to use them in actual websites
My apologies. Since your original post used the past tense ("The problem with CSS is that it took 25 damn years to get to the point...") I took that to mean the 25 years prior to your post.
Also, it's good to know that in 5 years I will finally be able to work on "actual" web sites and not the imaginary web sites I've been working on for the past 18 years...;-)
And I actually like CSS, I just think it took too long to get to this point. Why this is so is beyond me. Other technologies have advanced much, much faster.
What other technology has had to provide a consistent UI experience on multiple platforms through multiple applications, even while those application providers are trying to incorporate their own - often competing - interpretations of a standard? As alluded to in TFA, it didn't help that the original CSS spec didn't include a test suite. But beyond that, the browser wars were enough to freeze any meaningful implementation of web standards for at least a decade.
Just because CSS was proposed 20 years ago doesn't mean it sprang fully grown from Hakon Lie's head on that day. For that reason, I was referencing the date when CSS became a recommendation - December 1996 - which means that CSS is almost 18.
HTML's first draft was released in mid-1993. However, since this pre-dates the W3C and its recommendation standards, and because it was being used in NCSA Mosaic at that time, I was using this release date as its birthdate.
I never bought into the "don't use tables" nonsense myself. Tables provide abstract organization of layout. It's a lot cleaner to apply some CSS to a table than to shoehorn it in to a whole lot of divs just for maintaine Ideotlogical Purity..
In my experience, a "simple" table layout still has more markup than an equivalent div layout. A three-column table layout will require a table, tbody, tr, and three td tag elements, all properly nested. A three-column div-based layout requires three div tags, possibly contained in a fourth div. That's hardly shoehorning.
The problem with CSS is that it took 25 damn years to get to the point where windowing system were already in the 90s....
TFA says that CSS was proposed 20 years ago today. It wasn't released as a spec until December 1996. While the number 25 plays nicely into your rant, in reality, CSS isn't old enough to vote. Hell, even HTML is barely old enough to drink.
1) Cascading. What the F? In order to figure out what is going on I have to work back through all the cascaded sheets to figure out what's going on
Yeah! Why can't CSS be like any other language or framework where the functions, classes, methods, etc. are always automagically available to the developer without having to look through the codebase at all? If only developers had some sort of debugging type tool where they could trace where styles come from. Something like...Firebug. Or Developer Tools. Or Web Inspector. Or basically the tools that come packaged in any major browser....
2) "Separation of content and presentation" Yeah, that's a great idea, but not in HTML. HTML *is* a presentation layer. Who writes content in plain jane HTML? Idiots, that's who. Everyone else writes in something else (Markdown, XML) and compiles to HTML.. CSS is a negative there.
HTML is *not* a presentation layer, it's a content layer. That's why the elements used in HTML are primarily semantic - paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, field sets, inputs, labels, etc. Even the HTML 5 elements - navigation, callouts (secondary content), video, audio, etc. - are semantic and have no intrinsic visual/presentation value beyond what the browser assigns to it.
And even if you do use another means of authoring your content, the fact that it compiles to HTML only underscores the fact that HTML is a content layer. Markdown in particular compiles to some of the most vanilla HTML you will ever find.
3) CSS syntax is completely unrelated to HTML syntax. Thanks a lot
Why would CSS syntax be the same as HTML? The two languages have different purposes and areas of concerns. Are you also irritated that javascript has a different syntax than HTML? At any rate, CSS is well designed for doing its job: *describing* how to select an HTML element and assign appropriate styling to it.
If only it were as simple and predictable as that. In fact, most residencies will include one on-call shift every four days. This isn't IT call; you are actually residing at the hospital and entails getting to the hospital at your normal start time around 6 am to pre-round on your patients, then working straight through until around 12 or 1 pm the following day. You may catch an hour or two of uninterrupted napping around 3am on the second day of that shift, but only if your load is light and the nurses don't run into problems. So that's a 30-hour shift in between 10- to 12-hour shifts.
(And if you're a surgical resident, that schedule is the one you use to lie on your time tracking reports, because you've likely worked 40 hours more than that in a given week.)
As for 'it's a pretty interesting job that pays well', it may be interesting, but per hour it pays slightly better than shift manager at a fast food restaurant.
"Experience" == being the current fashion, making products with a brand that makes you feel better about yourself. If you can't describe what distinguishes it, the distinction just isn't there. You're like a Pepsi loyalist who can't pick it out from the other brand in a blind test.
Except "Experience" != "Trendy". Experience is something everyone encounters every time they use a device or software. As such, an experience is something that can be designed so that the end user has a positive, useful interaction. Now, the number of attributes that come together to form an experience - visual, spatial, technical, terminology, etc. - can be so numerous that it is hard to put your finger on why an experience is positive or negative, but just because a user can't describe the distinguishing characteristics doesn't mean the experience isn't there.
If your products are known for their good user experience, then by default, that becomes part of your brand. Whether or not the marketing folks explicitly tout that as part of the brand is actually optional. But if a company just says 'we've got a great user experience!' over and over again to try and make it part of their brand, it will almost inevitably fail. Instead, that company will either come off as tone-deaf to the needs of its users or just clueless as to what makes a good experience.
If Apple really can't stand people poking fun at them when they screw up, perhaps they should stop being so fucking secretive and start doing some proper testing in the real world.
They were gonna do that, but unfortunately the guy who was supposed to carry out those tests lost his iPhone in a bar...
I'm sorry, I missed the part where the government is depriving a citizen of any liberty.
Where hospitals or other medical facilities have instituted public health policies aimed at reducing infection risks for both their patients and staff, they have acted as private employers.
If you feel that your personal safety or liberty is somehow compromised by required vaccinations, and you can't stomach such draconian policies, no one - not the state, not the hospital - is requiring you to stay at that job. Walk away with your personal liberty intact.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA.
Yes, but they are not in Europe. It is still a concern.
Given that the article was about a U.S. hospital, and the bulk of the concerns in the comments were about U.S. vaccination policy, the fact that adjuvants are allowed in Europe really didn't warrant comment. Those vaccines aren't coming here unless the pandemic worsens significantly and there is no way to manufacture additional adjuvant-free vaccine.
With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
Sure about that? First of it's a ridiculous argument, indeed the level of mercury in tuna are alarmingly high, it doesn't make it right. And regardless, you would have to eat a heck of a lot of tuna to equal even one flu shot.
The FDA lists the mean methylmercury content of canned albacore tuna to be.353ppm. That means 6 ounces (170g) of tuna contains approximately 59.5mcg of methylmercury, or slightly more than a 1mg dose of flu vaccine.
Let me demonstrate and I will give references. The Flu vaccine contains 25mcg of mercury (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/acip/dosage.htm) this is the seasonal flu link, the h1n1 contains the same amount. Oh sure , you can request the single dose without the mercury, but unless you do, your probably getting the multi-dose. The safe level of mercury is 0.1 mcg per kg body weight, (http://www.gotmercury.org/article.php?id=1169) So a 68kg (~150lb) person safe limit is 6.8mcg per day.
Kind of. What you're quoting is a reference dose, and it's a rate with a time component, not just a simple level. The RfD that you're quoting is the EPA's reference dose, and yes, it's.01mcg/kg body weight per day. So on one day, your 68kg person would ingest a higher than recommended amount, but if the person avoid tuna melts for the next week, his reference dose is back within the EPA's recommendation.
So you just shot almost 4 times the safe limit for an average adult directly into your blood stream.
As a point of clarification, vaccines are injected into the muscle, not directly into the blood stream.
Worse the age group for fluzone is 6months or older... a large 6-7m infant might be 10kg as a high avg, that 1mcg safe limit... great you just shot up your infant with 25 times the safe levels.
Of course, that concern is why they also make the vaccine available in preservative-free doses. It's also why pediatricians will discuss the risks and benefits with parents.
This is on top most people already being near or above the safe daily limits taken in from water and foods. Looking at (http://www.csgnetwork.com/hgqtycalc.html) , eating a can of tuna for the same 150lb person a week is just slightly higher than what is considered safe levels. Don't forget children are to get 3 shots, 1 seasonal and 2 h1n1...
With the exception of broken lightbulbs, thermometers, and dental fillings, you've just outlined the major vectors f
I have no beef with nurses; in fact, i respect and appreciate their role in the medical profession. But seeing as how they don't prescribe medicine and don't undergo the same training as physicians, the fact that one RN notes that pharmaceutical companies contribute to textbook production is an interesting anecdote and nothing more. It is just as meaningful as my observation that I know a lot of doctors who refuse any sort of drug rep gifts on the grounds that it might influence their decision to prescribe.
What neither anecdote indicates is that there is just as much skepticism within medical colleges to the relationship between funding sources and conclusions as there are outside of the walls; that there are ethics courses focused on the critical analysis of pharmaceutical claims; that, in general, no serious text can get around scientific fact just to present and position their own product. (The faculty, after all, have to approve the referenced texts, and precious few of them desire to be perceived as corporate shills.)
The hospitals I am familiar with have exceptions for people who cannot take the vaccine because of health reasons like egg allergies or compromised immune systems. They are required to provide appropriate documentation from their personal physician.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA. With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
As for your scary-sounding list, yes, it's a list of possible adverse effects that a person may experience - but it is not an indication of likelihood. No medication is without risk, but in general, people take the medication because the benefits outweigh the risks by a significant margin.
To put it in a grossly exaggerated, probably flawed slashdot-style analogy, the documented possible side effects of flying in a plane are motion sickness, legionnaire's disease, food poisoning, lice infestation, mental anguish, deep vein thrombosis, alcohol abuse, insomnia, halitosis, delayed departure, poverty, or becoming part of a suicide mission that turns your plane into a bomb. But more likely than any of those you'll get to your destination with very little lasting impact on your personal health or safety - as long as you remember that stupid 4-1-1 rule.
It is true that the flu mist is an attenuated vaccine. But it is also NOT given to all healthcare workers.
The major medical center with which I am most familiar is giving flu vaccine injections (NOT flu mist) to caregivers who work in the clinics with severely immuno-compromised patients - hematology/oncology, bone marrow transplant, critical care, etc. Flu mist is given to those who either have little patient contact (IT employees, maintenance, lab researchers, etc.) or who work with otherwise healthy patients (psychiatry, community clinics, etc.)
I also understand that this is the standard procedure for most medical facilities, from small private practices to major medical centers.
The automatic shade of "It's not really as good as it seems" is interesting. Anyway, of course it's not an absolute solution, but is there any reason not to use it?
Of course not. By all means, we should use what we need to get us through to the move away from a finite fuel source.
We still use paper, even though we have digital stuff, too. I don't see why we should make paper insanely expensive simply to push towards going entirely digital (or something like that).
Bad analogy. Paper is essentially renewable, and producing it is, all things considered, probably as energy intensive as producing the electricity that keeps that digital "stuff" flipping its ones and zeros.
Producing fuel from burning dead dino juice is less expensive than, say, farming algae to burn it, but only for the short term. In the long term, dino juice goes away and we get the gnashing of teeth that comes with $23 gallons of gas, the realization that our entire economy is based on cheap dino juice, and utter amazement that we don't have an alternative energy source in place.
If there's a huge deposit of oil in US... well, hopefully there is no endangered snail that has to live on that huge plot of land.:)
Agreed:)
Also, regarding your subject line, I am not sure anyone is quite as stupid as you would make them out to be, that we have found an infinite supply of oil that will make us independence forever.
You haven't met my father-in-law.
Is your point that since it's not a renewable resource, we shouldn't pursue it at all, or use it to get partially energy independent while working on securing energy independence in other ways?
The latter. Remember, in the 80s we had fairly fuel-efficient cars as a direct result of the oil crises in the 70s, in sharp contrast to the gas guzzlers from the 60s and 70s. But once fuel went back to being cheap, in the popular view there was no reason NOT to build big cars on truck frames that got gas mileage in the mid- and low-teens. There was no regard for change in demand that might come from other corners of the world, and certainly very little thought put towards what would happen if/when oil started to get too expensive.
As far as I can tell, Apple still sells plenty of laptops with optical drives. They even sell one as an accessory for this machine.
The fact you are gleefully glossing over this fact in your hurry to paint this one item as a lock-in tool is that this is a subnotebook -- meaning that it doesn't have all of the features that you might expect from a regular laptop in order to meet a number of design goals. If your design goals are small form factor and extended battery life, what are the first things you sacrifice? Bulky, power-consuming electronics like a DVD drive.
But don't let me get in the way of your lock-in rage...
Yes and no. You are certainly free to set your own style sheet specifying your own typeface to override a site's choices. However, that doesn't mean you're going to anticipate all invocations of a typeface, since user style sheets, like all CSS, works at at the element level and is not as a typeface substitution method.
Of course, the other thing to consider is that web designs -- for good or for bad -- use the typeface as an integral part of the design. Just because you like Rotis Sans instead of Arial doesn't mean that someone else's web design will look any better with your choice of font substituted for the designer's.
But as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Feel free to substitute away with a user style sheet.
(and for the record, I have no love for microsoft typefaces. Comic Sans may be one of the most abominable typefaces ever foisted on humanity.)
I have plenty of suggestions. Please forward your contact information and complete records of your piracy to avastyescurvydogs@riaa.org and we will be in contact with you.
Sincerely, Cap't James Siezemore Head of Pirate Relations RIAA
Slashdot Mirror
In a parallel universe, this question was asked on slashart: "why is it that art history majors need Calculus to be well rounded but engineering majors don't need to take 17th Century Baroque Masters for the same reason?"
The problem with education is not that teachers don't have access to computers but that if you gave those teachers access to everything they wouldn't know what to do with it.
If you want to get kids knowledgeable and excited about technology then you need teachers that are knowledgeable and excited about technology. Most aren't. Most are liberal arts majors that think the internet is facebook.
Because of licensing requirements, most teachers were probably education majors with an emphasis on their subject area, not pure 'liberal arts' majors. Regardless, the internet has been around long enough younger teachers are probably as savvy with internet usage as any other millennial, while older teachers were using the internet before Facebook let them register with the site.
Your school needs some help? Hire some CS majors. Why is this rocket science for people?
If we wanted to teach our kids how to play a musical instrument, would it not be obvious that the teacher would themselves have to know how to play? Obviously.
Yet how many teachers presumed to be able to teach technology are actually knowledgable about technology?
Exactly.
Exactly what? You have given exactly no data regarding the technology expertise of elementary or secondary teachers. You have just assumed we all think teachers are idiots who can't possibly be as smart as a CS major, because if there's one thing I've learned about CS majors in my time on Slashdot is that clearly they know everything about everything...just ask them!
In fact, many schools now hire technology specialists who not only help teachers use technology appropriately in the classroom, they can also teach students how to use technology. In elementary grades, this position works just like a music or art teacher. In upper grades, they may have their own specialty classes, again, like the music and art teachers, where technology is the focus. Other than that, if my kid is in an English composition class, I want him to be able to focus on researching a topic and then writing well about the subject, using the tools that are most appropriate for the task, not getting a CS lecture on logic gates or learning how to write his own word processor.
[snip]...The entire teacher hiring process has to be reviewed.
The teaching profession is not attracting the right people. Here someone will say "they're not paid enough money"... Yes and no. Some of them are not paid enough and some of them are paid far too much. Part of the issue is that the teachers want to be paid based on seniority rather on the actual quality of their work or on whether their skills as a teacher are actually in demand. So a PE coach that has been working at a school for many years expects to be paid more than a new science teacher that is actually hard to attract.
Wrong way to do it. You pay people according to how hard they are to attract. People that are really easy to get are paid less. People that are harder to get are paid more. Added to that, you reward teachers that are good at their jobs while generally paying the crappy ones what you think they're worth... which might be not a lot...[snip]
Frankly, there's more to being a good teacher - particularly in the younger grades - than just subject knowledge. If you think it's all babysitting and giving busywork, then I can see why you think some (non-science) teachers are overpaid. Teachers are not only responsible for having subject knowledge, they are responsible for: imparting that knowledge to 20-30 different learners at a time; keeping those students on task and progressing; constantly evaluating if
I said that in 5 years CSS will be at the point where the elimination of the main pain points are supported widely enough to be able to use them in actual websites
My apologies. Since your original post used the past tense ("The problem with CSS is that it took 25 damn years to get to the point...") I took that to mean the 25 years prior to your post.
Also, it's good to know that in 5 years I will finally be able to work on "actual" web sites and not the imaginary web sites I've been working on for the past 18 years... ;-)
And I actually like CSS, I just think it took too long to get to this point. Why this is so is beyond me. Other technologies have advanced much, much faster.
What other technology has had to provide a consistent UI experience on multiple platforms through multiple applications, even while those application providers are trying to incorporate their own - often competing - interpretations of a standard? As alluded to in TFA, it didn't help that the original CSS spec didn't include a test suite. But beyond that, the browser wars were enough to freeze any meaningful implementation of web standards for at least a decade.
Just because CSS was proposed 20 years ago doesn't mean it sprang fully grown from Hakon Lie's head on that day. For that reason, I was referencing the date when CSS became a recommendation - December 1996 - which means that CSS is almost 18.
HTML's first draft was released in mid-1993. However, since this pre-dates the W3C and its recommendation standards, and because it was being used in NCSA Mosaic at that time, I was using this release date as its birthdate.
I never bought into the "don't use tables" nonsense myself. Tables provide abstract organization of layout. It's a lot cleaner to apply some CSS to a table than to shoehorn it in to a whole lot of divs just for maintaine Ideotlogical Purity..
In my experience, a "simple" table layout still has more markup than an equivalent div layout. A three-column table layout will require a table, tbody, tr, and three td tag elements, all properly nested. A three-column div-based layout requires three div tags, possibly contained in a fourth div. That's hardly shoehorning.
The problem with CSS is that it took 25 damn years to get to the point where windowing system were already in the 90s....
TFA says that CSS was proposed 20 years ago today. It wasn't released as a spec until December 1996. While the number 25 plays nicely into your rant, in reality, CSS isn't old enough to vote. Hell, even HTML is barely old enough to drink.
1) Cascading. What the F? In order to figure out what is going on I have to work back through all the cascaded sheets to figure out what's going on
Yeah! Why can't CSS be like any other language or framework where the functions, classes, methods, etc. are always automagically available to the developer without having to look through the codebase at all? If only developers had some sort of debugging type tool where they could trace where styles come from. Something like...Firebug. Or Developer Tools. Or Web Inspector. Or basically the tools that come packaged in any major browser....
2) "Separation of content and presentation" Yeah, that's a great idea, but not in HTML. HTML *is* a presentation layer. Who writes content in plain jane HTML? Idiots, that's who. Everyone else writes in something else (Markdown, XML) and compiles to HTML.. CSS is a negative there.
HTML is *not* a presentation layer, it's a content layer. That's why the elements used in HTML are primarily semantic - paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, field sets, inputs, labels, etc. Even the HTML 5 elements - navigation, callouts (secondary content), video, audio, etc. - are semantic and have no intrinsic visual/presentation value beyond what the browser assigns to it.
And even if you do use another means of authoring your content, the fact that it compiles to HTML only underscores the fact that HTML is a content layer. Markdown in particular compiles to some of the most vanilla HTML you will ever find.
3) CSS syntax is completely unrelated to HTML syntax. Thanks a lot
Why would CSS syntax be the same as HTML? The two languages have different purposes and areas of concerns. Are you also irritated that javascript has a different syntax than HTML? At any rate, CSS is well designed for doing its job: *describing* how to select an HTML element and assign appropriate styling to it.
What you are describing is training.
training is not Education.
Education makes it easier to train someone, but training is not - and should not be - the sole point of Education.
If only it were as simple and predictable as that. In fact, most residencies will include one on-call shift every four days. This isn't IT call; you are actually residing at the hospital and entails getting to the hospital at your normal start time around 6 am to pre-round on your patients, then working straight through until around 12 or 1 pm the following day. You may catch an hour or two of uninterrupted napping around 3am on the second day of that shift, but only if your load is light and the nurses don't run into problems. So that's a 30-hour shift in between 10- to 12-hour shifts.
(And if you're a surgical resident, that schedule is the one you use to lie on your time tracking reports, because you've likely worked 40 hours more than that in a given week.)
As for 'it's a pretty interesting job that pays well', it may be interesting, but per hour it pays slightly better than shift manager at a fast food restaurant.
"Experience" == being the current fashion, making products with a brand that makes you feel better about yourself. If you can't describe what distinguishes it, the distinction just isn't there. You're like a Pepsi loyalist who can't pick it out from the other brand in a blind test.
Except "Experience" != "Trendy". Experience is something everyone encounters every time they use a device or software. As such, an experience is something that can be designed so that the end user has a positive, useful interaction. Now, the number of attributes that come together to form an experience - visual, spatial, technical, terminology, etc. - can be so numerous that it is hard to put your finger on why an experience is positive or negative, but just because a user can't describe the distinguishing characteristics doesn't mean the experience isn't there.
If your products are known for their good user experience, then by default, that becomes part of your brand. Whether or not the marketing folks explicitly tout that as part of the brand is actually optional. But if a company just says 'we've got a great user experience!' over and over again to try and make it part of their brand, it will almost inevitably fail. Instead, that company will either come off as tone-deaf to the needs of its users or just clueless as to what makes a good experience.
If Apple really can't stand people poking fun at them when they screw up, perhaps they should stop being so fucking secretive and start doing some proper testing in the real world.
They were gonna do that, but unfortunately the guy who was supposed to carry out those tests lost his iPhone in a bar...
I'm sorry, I missed the part where the government is depriving a citizen of any liberty.
Where hospitals or other medical facilities have instituted public health policies aimed at reducing infection risks for both their patients and staff, they have acted as private employers.
If you feel that your personal safety or liberty is somehow compromised by required vaccinations, and you can't stomach such draconian policies, no one - not the state, not the hospital - is requiring you to stay at that job. Walk away with your personal liberty intact.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA.
Yes, but they are not in Europe. It is still a concern.
Given that the article was about a U.S. hospital, and the bulk of the concerns in the comments were about U.S. vaccination policy, the fact that adjuvants are allowed in Europe really didn't warrant comment. Those vaccines aren't coming here unless the pandemic worsens significantly and there is no way to manufacture additional adjuvant-free vaccine.
With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
Sure about that? First of it's a ridiculous argument, indeed the level of mercury in tuna are alarmingly high, it doesn't make it right. And regardless, you would have to eat a heck of a lot of tuna to equal even one flu shot.
The FDA lists the mean methylmercury content of canned albacore tuna to be .353ppm. That means 6 ounces (170g) of tuna contains approximately 59.5mcg of methylmercury, or slightly more than a 1mg dose of flu vaccine.
The point IS salient becuase despite that level, the FDA has indicated that tuna is safe for children to eat up to 6 ounces per week.
Let me demonstrate and I will give references. The Flu vaccine contains 25mcg of mercury (http://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/acip/dosage.htm) this is the seasonal flu link, the h1n1 contains the same amount. Oh sure , you can request the single dose without the mercury, but unless you do, your probably getting the multi-dose. The safe level of mercury is 0.1 mcg per kg body weight, (http://www.gotmercury.org/article.php?id=1169) So a 68kg (~150lb) person safe limit is 6.8mcg per day.
Kind of. What you're quoting is a reference dose, and it's a rate with a time component, not just a simple level. The RfD that you're quoting is the EPA's reference dose, and yes, it's .01mcg/kg body weight per day. So on one day, your 68kg person would ingest a higher than recommended amount, but if the person avoid tuna melts for the next week, his reference dose is back within the EPA's recommendation.
It's also worth noting that there are several reference doses issued by different agencies; the EPA's is the most conservative. The World Health Organization has the highest reference dose of 1.6mcg/kg/week of body weight.
So you just shot almost 4 times the safe limit for an average adult directly into your blood stream.
As a point of clarification, vaccines are injected into the muscle, not directly into the blood stream.
Worse the age group for fluzone is 6months or older... a large 6-7m infant might be 10kg as a high avg, that 1mcg safe limit... great you just shot up your infant with 25 times the safe levels.
Of course, that concern is why they also make the vaccine available in preservative-free doses. It's also why pediatricians will discuss the risks and benefits with parents.
This is on top most people already being near or above the safe daily limits taken in from water and foods. Looking at (http://www.csgnetwork.com/hgqtycalc.html) , eating a can of tuna for the same 150lb person a week is just slightly higher than what is considered safe levels. Don't forget children are to get 3 shots, 1 seasonal and 2 h1n1...
With the exception of broken lightbulbs, thermometers, and dental fillings, you've just outlined the major vectors f
Well, I know that they don't prescribe medicine.
I have no beef with nurses; in fact, i respect and appreciate their role in the medical profession. But seeing as how they don't prescribe medicine and don't undergo the same training as physicians, the fact that one RN notes that pharmaceutical companies contribute to textbook production is an interesting anecdote and nothing more. It is just as meaningful as my observation that I know a lot of doctors who refuse any sort of drug rep gifts on the grounds that it might influence their decision to prescribe.
What neither anecdote indicates is that there is just as much skepticism within medical colleges to the relationship between funding sources and conclusions as there are outside of the walls; that there are ethics courses focused on the critical analysis of pharmaceutical claims; that, in general, no serious text can get around scientific fact just to present and position their own product. (The faculty, after all, have to approve the referenced texts, and precious few of them desire to be perceived as corporate shills.)
The hospitals I am familiar with have exceptions for people who cannot take the vaccine because of health reasons like egg allergies or compromised immune systems. They are required to provide appropriate documentation from their personal physician.
Nice try, but squalene and other adjuvants are forbidden in U.S. vaccines by the FDA. With regards to the mercury, if it's that big of a concern to you, I hope you are on a tuna-free diet because there is more mercury in a tuna sandwich than in the thiomersal of any vaccine available in the U.S..
As for your scary-sounding list, yes, it's a list of possible adverse effects that a person may experience - but it is not an indication of likelihood. No medication is without risk, but in general, people take the medication because the benefits outweigh the risks by a significant margin.
To put it in a grossly exaggerated, probably flawed slashdot-style analogy, the documented possible side effects of flying in a plane are motion sickness, legionnaire's disease, food poisoning, lice infestation, mental anguish, deep vein thrombosis, alcohol abuse, insomnia, halitosis, delayed departure, poverty, or becoming part of a suicide mission that turns your plane into a bomb. But more likely than any of those you'll get to your destination with very little lasting impact on your personal health or safety - as long as you remember that stupid 4-1-1 rule.
I'm glad to know your mom went through medical school and saw this influence first-hand and not just through drug rep lunches at the office.
Oh wait, she didn't? Sorry. My bad.
It is true that the flu mist is an attenuated vaccine. But it is also NOT given to all healthcare workers.
The major medical center with which I am most familiar is giving flu vaccine injections (NOT flu mist) to caregivers who work in the clinics with severely immuno-compromised patients - hematology/oncology, bone marrow transplant, critical care, etc. Flu mist is given to those who either have little patient contact (IT employees, maintenance, lab researchers, etc.) or who work with otherwise healthy patients (psychiatry, community clinics, etc.)
I also understand that this is the standard procedure for most medical facilities, from small private practices to major medical centers.
Of course not. By all means, we should use what we need to get us through to the move away from a finite fuel source.
We still use paper, even though we have digital stuff, too. I don't see why we should make paper insanely expensive simply to push towards going entirely digital (or something like that).Bad analogy. Paper is essentially renewable, and producing it is, all things considered, probably as energy intensive as producing the electricity that keeps that digital "stuff" flipping its ones and zeros.
Producing fuel from burning dead dino juice is less expensive than, say, farming algae to burn it, but only for the short term. In the long term, dino juice goes away and we get the gnashing of teeth that comes with $23 gallons of gas, the realization that our entire economy is based on cheap dino juice, and utter amazement that we don't have an alternative energy source in place.
If there's a huge deposit of oil in US... well, hopefully there is no endangered snail that has to live on that huge plot of land.Agreed :)
Also, regarding your subject line, I am not sure anyone is quite as stupid as you would make them out to be, that we have found an infinite supply of oil that will make us independence forever.You haven't met my father-in-law.
Is your point that since it's not a renewable resource, we shouldn't pursue it at all, or use it to get partially energy independent while working on securing energy independence in other ways?The latter. Remember, in the 80s we had fairly fuel-efficient cars as a direct result of the oil crises in the 70s, in sharp contrast to the gas guzzlers from the 60s and 70s. But once fuel went back to being cheap, in the popular view there was no reason NOT to build big cars on truck frames that got gas mileage in the mid- and low-teens. There was no regard for change in demand that might come from other corners of the world, and certainly very little thought put towards what would happen if/when oil started to get too expensive.
It's that mistake I don't care to repeat.
algae is also happy in fun little tubes, not just in ponds and lakes.
Even if the field is as productive as the summary makes it sound, it should be treated as a reprieve, not as an absolute solution.
Lock-in?
Seriously?
How is it lock-in?
As far as I can tell, Apple still sells plenty of laptops with optical drives. They even sell one as an accessory for this machine.
The fact you are gleefully glossing over this fact in your hurry to paint this one item as a lock-in tool is that this is a subnotebook -- meaning that it doesn't have all of the features that you might expect from a regular laptop in order to meet a number of design goals. If your design goals are small form factor and extended battery life, what are the first things you sacrifice? Bulky, power-consuming electronics like a DVD drive.
But don't let me get in the way of your lock-in rage...
Um...so what would the problem be with that?
Yes and no. You are certainly free to set your own style sheet specifying your own typeface to override a site's choices. However, that doesn't mean you're going to anticipate all invocations of a typeface, since user style sheets, like all CSS, works at at the element level and is not as a typeface substitution method.
Of course, the other thing to consider is that web designs -- for good or for bad -- use the typeface as an integral part of the design. Just because you like Rotis Sans instead of Arial doesn't mean that someone else's web design will look any better with your choice of font substituted for the designer's.
But as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Feel free to substitute away with a user style sheet.
(and for the record, I have no love for microsoft typefaces. Comic Sans may be one of the most abominable typefaces ever foisted on humanity.)
I have plenty of suggestions. Please forward your contact information and complete records of your piracy to avastyescurvydogs@riaa.org and we will be in contact with you.
Sincerely,
Cap't James Siezemore
Head of Pirate Relations
RIAA