In many cases, the pain was created by actual trauma, but remains long after the trauma is gone. Jerry Lewis estimates that he did 19,000 pratfalls during his career playing a bumbling fool (basically the same act as the "Jackass" guys do now, without the life-threatening setups, drug use, or foul language). Jerry's act left him with 37 years of excruciating pain, long after the pratfalls had ended. Even after his back had healed from all of its injuries, the pain remained, to the point that he had major depression and was suicidal. Doctors had him on pain-killer cocktails and had tried various surgeries, but nothing worked to reduce the chronic pain. Finally, his doctor recommended electrodes (the same system in this brain implant story) be implanted in his spine. He is now totally free of pain. Sometimes, a lifestyle change is not enough. It is estimated that 100,000 people suffer from chronic pain not related to recent trauma.
The medical information available online is basically what every medical student learns in the first year of medical school. This drug goes with that. This symptom points to that. The rest of medical scholl and the years of practice afterward are what make doctors into doctors. It has to do with seeing the symptoms hundreds of times in actual people and watching how the actual drugs affect hundreds of actual humans that makes a doctor a doctor.
Make a list of the ways you imagine manking hurts the earth. Reality be damned. Now write an article showing how each of man's damages would self-repair over time. Ignore the areas where man is actually supporting the ecosystem. (e.g., The first thing that would happen is all domesticated animals would die, from lack of being unable to feed themseleves. Except millions of pet dogs, which would form huge packs to kill off the rest of the world's animals.)
It would have been just as simple to come up with a list of ways you imagine mankind supports the earth. Reality be damned. Then write an article showing how each of man's supports would topple over time, leaving the earth a vast wasteland.
Boring.
The implantable defibrillator. Has saved over 80,000 lives so far, after what is now an outpatient surgery. Has been found to be more effective than drugs in patients who are at risk for sudden cardiac death.
Isn't that like buying a used car, just so you can send it to the junkyard? How does Comcast profit by buying a low-rated channel and then deleting it? Did Comcast not know the ratings when they bought the thing?
Comcast is my current cable company and broadband provider. Customer service and quality for both are horrible. The previous owner, AT&T, was actually quite brilliant by comparison. All operations at Comcast, down to the last cable splicer, seem to be run from a very high level by bean counters who don't know or care anything about media, the internet, entertainment, hardware, or any of the other things you might expect from a cable/broadband company.
Keep in mind that Comcast was the first company to buckle and hand over private customer information when the RIAA showed up with a handful of blank subpeonas, severely violating the terms of service we signed up for when it was AT&T. There was never any public indication that those terms changed when Comcast took over, but they clearly did.
So. Do I expect Comcast to do the wrong thing? Absolutely.
The second reason the new economy is inhospitable to noxious people is what I call the New Telegraph. In the Old West, communications technology in the form of telegraph wires changed the composition of commercial life. It taught merchants that they had to be decent. Before the telegraph, scamming someone wasn't difficult. My Granny Hattie, who was in her late eighties when I was a child, told me about an old relative of ours who used to sell some miracle cleanser that was basically an inexpensive soap solution packaged as a fancy cure-all. He did well simply by moving to the next county if anyone wised up to his gimmick. But he went out of business once the telegraph wires went up, because the word that he was a snake-oil salesman traveled faster than he could.
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In many cases, the pain was created by actual trauma, but remains long after the trauma is gone. Jerry Lewis estimates that he did 19,000 pratfalls during his career playing a bumbling fool (basically the same act as the "Jackass" guys do now, without the life-threatening setups, drug use, or foul language). Jerry's act left him with 37 years of excruciating pain, long after the pratfalls had ended. Even after his back had healed from all of its injuries, the pain remained, to the point that he had major depression and was suicidal. Doctors had him on pain-killer cocktails and had tried various surgeries, but nothing worked to reduce the chronic pain. Finally, his doctor recommended electrodes (the same system in this brain implant story) be implanted in his spine. He is now totally free of pain. Sometimes, a lifestyle change is not enough. It is estimated that 100,000 people suffer from chronic pain not related to recent trauma.
The medical information available online is basically what every medical student learns in the first year of medical school. This drug goes with that. This symptom points to that. The rest of medical scholl and the years of practice afterward are what make doctors into doctors. It has to do with seeing the symptoms hundreds of times in actual people and watching how the actual drugs affect hundreds of actual humans that makes a doctor a doctor.
Make a list of the ways you imagine manking hurts the earth. Reality be damned. Now write an article showing how each of man's damages would self-repair over time. Ignore the areas where man is actually supporting the ecosystem. (e.g., The first thing that would happen is all domesticated animals would die, from lack of being unable to feed themseleves. Except millions of pet dogs, which would form huge packs to kill off the rest of the world's animals.) It would have been just as simple to come up with a list of ways you imagine mankind supports the earth. Reality be damned. Then write an article showing how each of man's supports would topple over time, leaving the earth a vast wasteland. Boring.
The implantable defibrillator. Has saved over 80,000 lives so far, after what is now an outpatient surgery. Has been found to be more effective than drugs in patients who are at risk for sudden cardiac death.
Isn't that like buying a used car, just so you can send it to the junkyard? How does Comcast profit by buying a low-rated channel and then deleting it? Did Comcast not know the ratings when they bought the thing?
Comcast is my current cable company and broadband provider. Customer service and quality for both are horrible. The previous owner, AT&T, was actually quite brilliant by comparison. All operations at Comcast, down to the last cable splicer, seem to be run from a very high level by bean counters who don't know or care anything about media, the internet, entertainment, hardware, or any of the other things you might expect from a cable/broadband company. Keep in mind that Comcast was the first company to buckle and hand over private customer information when the RIAA showed up with a handful of blank subpeonas, severely violating the terms of service we signed up for when it was AT&T. There was never any public indication that those terms changed when Comcast took over, but they clearly did. So. Do I expect Comcast to do the wrong thing? Absolutely.
Well. More than 400 stores (less than 500).
In Minneapolis: The Bakken Museum
Across the river in St. Paul: The Museum Of Questionable Medical Devices which is now in the Science Museum of Minnesota