That's because bottled water is perceived as better water--a purer, more natural, healthier alternative to tap water. People have a belief that tap water is toxic. I filter my tap water because it turns porcelain surfaces yellow with a biological film suffused with an iron-sulfate pigment.
It's Marxist if the company doesn't technically need those people and doesn't derive a profit from hiring them (excluding any subsidy provided). That means the cost of their wage-labor (benefits, wages, and taxes) must be less than the revenue generated by the company's operations requiring the worker which would otherwise be lost without the worker.
The Marxist ideal isn't "force them to play nice"; it's "sustain jobs where unnecessary, because reducing labor invested in a product is bad, even if you can make that product just as well with less labor."
That twinge of guilt is normalized out after a decade. We don't feel guilt about eliminating 97.78% of American agricultural jobs; today we talk about manufacture a lot, but 10 years ago NOBODY CARED. It's now a political issue; 10 years ago, we were jabbering a lot about STEM college degrees, and 10 years from now we'll have forgotten about the manufacture thing (because it's an artifact dredged up from the past) because the standard American job is IT--racking servers, running cables, the fast food worker of the future. In a world where you grew up just downloading songs while looking confusedly at people expecting you to pay for music (what, where does a 9-year-old get money to pay for music?), you'd feel the same tiny bit of guilt you might feel for all the lost American farm jobs.
Hell, look around you. People use Spotify free tier, Pandora, and Youtube, and refuse to buy music. Normal people. They're tangentially-aware that the service is supported by ads, and what they want most is for the ads to go away--so much so that anyone who can use an ad blocker blocks the YouTube ads which are theoretically paying for the music they consume. Many of those videos don't even have ads, don't show them all the time, or offer a Skip button in 5 seconds (which everyone clicks--enough that Skip Ad is a minor cultural phenomena and gets mentioned in any media playing on frustration with streaming services in general, not just YouTube).
Napster was originally a robust, decentralized p2p network for sharing entire directories full of individual files. Unlike bittorrent (sharing a torrent context), Napster would find a file of the same size, name, and content and transfer that. Its demise spawned Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella, Edonkey, and such.
Most modern music players can ID songs, determine the relevant album, and provide cover art. Rhythmbox can even supply lyrics; I think e.g. Banshee does similar. Amazon is selling MP3s without other crap attached.
While that's true, Napster and Gnutella were easier than anything I've used, and probably easier than anything possible. Spotify is about as easy, except I have to pay for Spotify.
Do you think anyone today outside a few eccentrics would buy music online if Napster hadn't been stopped? The music industry never stopped piracy, but they stopped the spread of such simple tools as a household item. Don't tell me Bittorrent is anything like opening an application, punching in something (Metallica, Avengers, Windows Enterprise Cracked), and downloading; I've used Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay and Google and Nutorrent and all the rest, and it's nice when you try to download Ubuntu and they give you a.torrent to use, and horrendous if you're hunting for something specific.
That's the victory they achieved: they stopped the ubiquity of free music, swapping from person to person, on every phone, on every tablet, on every PC, everywhere, with services like iTunes and Netflix being universally met with confusion at why such a thing would exist. They're now trying to stamp out what amounts to an underground coal mine fire: out of sight, irrelevant to 99.999% of the world, and impossible to stop with any amount of force.
How do you offer a better product at better than free? People obviously want the artist's product; and a rational person wants that product for the lowest price.
Windows 10 is the first Windows I've bothered to use much. I tried XP for a while and went back to Mandrake. Vista was dog balls. 7 was back to being XP. 8.1 was absolute garbage; I used it for Unity 3D for a while. Windows 10 surprised me by having a modern, useful interface with surprisingly-fewer flaws than all prior versions of Windows (useless Start menu search; Virtual desktops don't allow me to ctrl-alt-shift move windows; no exploded workspace view a la Gnome 3, although the alt-tab interface is better than Gnome 3), and by being an actual, competent OS.
Soon I'll get rid of Cygwin in favor of Ubuntu on Windows 10.
If it could just act as an iSCSI initiator at the home desktop level, I'd run it on a diskless machine with a cheap, low-capacity M2 and use FreeNAS to back its main program and data drive. Too bad the Windows installer can't do sensible things like mount a disk over C:\Program Files.
Internet included in rent (mounting a cost of $2 per unit diffused through the renters) and, especially, low-cost Internet are impossible. I know this because everyone rails on my Citizen's Dividend plan for being so horrible as to put the jobless, homeless, unemployed into small apartments with food and clean water but, horrifically, NO MONEY FOR INTERNET, dooming them to a life without cat pictures which is infinitely worse than eating out of people's garbage.
If you have the private key, you can listen in on encryption. If you do some monkey business in the protocol, you can make a passive eaves drop impossible even in this situation; in which case, if you have the private key, you can insert yourself in the network path and mediate the conversation, thus accessing the plaintext while posing as the end server in a way the client is 100% incapable of identifying and unable to mitigate.
Having one end hand over the keys does, in fact, completely remove end-to-end encryption for that eavesdropper.
In theory, a hostile Government can pressure the CA to provide a signature for a MITM certificate, although this is transparent (it's easily discovered if that certificate is ever revoked, and identifiable if the old certificate is known).
A hostile Government can pressure the end provider (e.g. Google) to submit their Private key, thus breaking TLS: the Client asks the Server for its Certificate, then uses that Certificate to dictate a session key (and client certificate) to the Server. A passive eavesdropper with the server's Private Key can decrypt this exchange.
The best I can come up with is the Client sends the Server a random public key, and the Server sends the Client a session key; then the hostile Government must use a MITM to break it. A passive eavesdropper can be stopped, but an active MITM can't.
Your endpoints have to be non-hostile for end-to-end encryption to work. If they're infiltrated, it doesn't work.
One of Marx's major ideals was that labor creates value, such that reducing labor was a great blow to the economy. If it took 10,000 hours to make a truck, that truck is less-valuable than one made by 5,000 hours of a man's labor. Thus Marx said we retain wealth by retaining employment, and that decreasing employment decreases the value of things and makes us poorer.
Your argument was in the same line of thinking: these workers, needed or not, should be brought back, because we should have workers. It's a supply-side (trickle-down) economics argument that follows pretty well with a certain set of Marxist economics.
Demand-side economics (Solow, Malthus) reflects the real world: jobs are created by consumer buying power (you buy things? Who makes, transports, and retails those things? Can they handle providing all these things? No? Guess we need more jobs!), and wealth is increased by making more things for the same wage-hours paid (that is: if the same number of working-hours produces twice as much stuff, then we are all able to buy... twice as much stuff; we all make twice as much with our same time, we get paid the same for that same time, and we end up able to buy twice as much as a result).
I was pointing out that your every breath is either "Every human being is a fucking waste of space" or "look how awesome I am because I like animals", because you're an evil, self-centered psychopath.
That's... interesting. Still, at a lower pressure, you're getting less oxygen (mg per kg of body weight) into your blood, in the same way that drinking a shot of moonshine is less alcohol than drinking 4 cans of beer and not diluted.
For a large enough driving pool in a localized area, you can determine statistical significance. Concentrated autonomous driving would tell you how well the cars drive with many other autonomous cars around; while having ~200,000 cars spread among the states would tell you how well they perform when surrounded almost entirely by standard, human-driven cars. This requires a large number of miles driven over a long span of time to generate sufficient data.
Dissimilar. An autonomous driver is a different kind of thing. CDL has all kinds of more-restrictive regulations on it because commercial drivers have a different level of training and general danger than passenger-vehicle drivers.
Demonstrating that a feature does not increase or actively decreases vehicular incidents builds a powerful case for reduced manufacturer liability. Demonstrating the improvement of that feature's safety benefits as a continuous process eliminates any legal standing for a negligence case. When the technology is normalized, defects outside normal variance then draw more scrutiny; with modern, widely-available technology greatly outperforming your own, you can only be found negligent.
That's itself dangerous, because then the car behaves unpredictably if that occurs. It's negative punishment, and it's been shown drivers will duct tape soda cans to the steering wheel to avoid this (because punishment has complex interactions with risk assessment, instead of blunt interactions with rewards reinforcement).
An erroneous driver causes a collision of a given magnitude. Similarly, an erroneous computer system assisting the driver causes a collision of a given magnitude.
If, in the long run, the human driver causes more collisions and, in similar situations, a greater magnitude of damage for a given collision, what do you say about the computer assist? It depends on your political position.
If you want to attack the assist, you hyperfocus on the fact that it was active and failed to prevent a collision at all. That tiny, singular effect brings the full weight of responsibility onto the computer assist.
If you want to support the computer assist, you cite that drivers without the assist cause collisions with greater frequency and deadliness than drivers on the assist. In that view, you demonstrate that the assist caused a net reduction of collisions.
The second position is more honest, largely because you can't make that argument if the numbers show the opposite (unless you make up fake numbers).
In medicine, a great deal of attention is given to cancer screenings. Over half of all men over the age of 50 have prostate cancer, and most men die with prostate cancer. Prostate screenings can detect these cancers, and cannot identify which cancers will cause harm and which will go unnoticed entirely by the patient. The current understanding in the medical field is that the harm caused by unnecessary prostate cancer remediation is immense--impotence, sepsis, hormonal imbalances, chronic constipation, and even death--while the number of lives saved and the amount of good done at all is little more than a statistical error.
This means prostate screenings and remediation actively spread large amounts of harm across the patient base, and are essentially a form of quackery; yet the medical community holds that doctors should never be penalized for their judgment on performing a screening, and should not be forced to withhold screening at a patient's request, because it is unethical to block the judgment of a medical professional in a situation where he believes the potential benefit is high, and it is unethical to deny the patient a chance to make his own decisions about his own health. Those decisions may be perilous, but they are the patient's to make for the same reason we don't force vaccines on everyone (although that's quickly becoming a public health issue rather than a patient health issue, which changes the ethical dynamic).
The issue raised here is similarly complex and is of similar form. In any given situation, a human operator may cause a fatality that autopilot could prevent, and autopilot could cause a fatality that a human operator would have avoided; in the span of all situations, one of these causes more harm than the other. If you want to hold autopilot accountable simply because it was active this once in this situation, is it not then also as valid to sue and imprison for manslaughter a human operator who was negligent by not utilizing autopilot to prevent a collision?
There's no such thing as non-toxic. Vitamin B1, consumed in any dose, won't absorb through your intestines; injected, it will seriously fuck you up in high concentrations. Water, drunk, will kill you by making your brain swell. Oxygen is deadly. Glucose is a vicious poison, and your body decays when you have too much of it in your blood; your pancreas constantly switches between insulin and glucagon release to bind blood sugar into glycogen and then release more sugar into your blood so your cells can consume it. Glyphosate is harmless at doses at which salt is harmful, and is fatally toxic at doses something like 3 times the toxic dose of table salt.
LC0 is the dose below which no adverse effects are demonstrated. Cyanide will kill you; less cyanide will make you violently ill; a very small concentration of cyanide will do NOTHING. Cyanide isn't non-toxic; you just didn't inhale enough of it.
The AHA, ACS, and CDC all have 50-year-old research and positions on these things. They lag behind modern science by an enormous margin.
In a study of 76,000 women, current and former smokers had statistically higher chances of lung cancer; exposure to second hand smoke showed NOTHING.
Studies that show links between second-hand smoke and disease are almost universally case-control, where you find someone who has a disease and ask if they were exposed to a potential cause. This kind of study overwhelmingly shows us that video games cause people to be violent psychopaths and should be abolished from society. Actual scientists involved in this kind of research have, for a *long* time, expected that the 7,300 lung cancers claimed caused by second-hand smoke might be more approximately ZERO.
Modern research can't find a link between nicotine in particular and heart disease, at all; nicotine is known to be non-carcinogenic at this point, but cigarettes have hundreds of toxic chemicals. The thing toxicologists know that you don't is those chemicals disperse in air and become laughably-minor doses, in the same way that eating a pound of salt WILL KILL YOU while drinking a half an ounce of automobile antifreeze won't do a damned thing to you. The thing CDC, AHA, and ACS know that you don't is they're not obligated to follow rigorous scientific standards; they have a mission, and they can use any flawed research available that was once generally-accepted and hasn't been firmly stamped out in the public mind to pursue that mission, as they can defend their "best judgement" as long as it's not well-known and well-accepted by the greater populous that they're wrong, and damn what the latest and most effective science says.
It's the same thing as red meat having NO SCIENTIFICALLY-VALID NEGATIVE HEALTH EFFECTS, while the Pork lobby had the campaign, "Pork: The Other White Meat" in the height of the red meat health scare because pork is red meat (nutritionally), but considered white meat in a culinary sense (they found a legal way to falsely market pork as a healthy alternative to red meat when it is, in fact, red meat).
Picketty. Note that "credibility" includes people like Ben Carson, who has said many things about economics (not this in particular) which people lauded, but which are wrong; Bernie Sanders also has credibility for the same reasons, as does Trump. That is: they're famous people who are deferred to because we see them as people who have important opinions on the matter.
If you want merit, the answer is Picketty has no merit (he's an economist whose grasp of economics is shitty); Bernie has no merit (his grasp of economics is shitty); Trump has no merit (he's a businessman; this doesn't translate to economics). Krugman has merit, and is also wrong, a lot (his grasp of modern theories is decent, and he doesn't go off in loony land like Picketty; just modern theories, like all theories, always, forever, are defective and will be improved in the future into less-defective theories).
I didn't read the rest of your manifesto because if you cannot contruct reasonable strawmen then the rest of your numbers are likely equally bad.
This is itself an unreasonable strawman argument: you disagree with a statement which is well-known and has been repeated again and again in the media and by various (lunatic) political candidates and economists who are taken wholly seriously, and claim that pointing out this lunacy eliminates all credibility from all statements made.
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That's because bottled water is perceived as better water--a purer, more natural, healthier alternative to tap water. People have a belief that tap water is toxic. I filter my tap water because it turns porcelain surfaces yellow with a biological film suffused with an iron-sulfate pigment.
It's Marxist if the company doesn't technically need those people and doesn't derive a profit from hiring them (excluding any subsidy provided). That means the cost of their wage-labor (benefits, wages, and taxes) must be less than the revenue generated by the company's operations requiring the worker which would otherwise be lost without the worker.
The Marxist ideal isn't "force them to play nice"; it's "sustain jobs where unnecessary, because reducing labor invested in a product is bad, even if you can make that product just as well with less labor."
That twinge of guilt is normalized out after a decade. We don't feel guilt about eliminating 97.78% of American agricultural jobs; today we talk about manufacture a lot, but 10 years ago NOBODY CARED. It's now a political issue; 10 years ago, we were jabbering a lot about STEM college degrees, and 10 years from now we'll have forgotten about the manufacture thing (because it's an artifact dredged up from the past) because the standard American job is IT--racking servers, running cables, the fast food worker of the future. In a world where you grew up just downloading songs while looking confusedly at people expecting you to pay for music (what, where does a 9-year-old get money to pay for music?), you'd feel the same tiny bit of guilt you might feel for all the lost American farm jobs.
Hell, look around you. People use Spotify free tier, Pandora, and Youtube, and refuse to buy music. Normal people. They're tangentially-aware that the service is supported by ads, and what they want most is for the ads to go away--so much so that anyone who can use an ad blocker blocks the YouTube ads which are theoretically paying for the music they consume. Many of those videos don't even have ads, don't show them all the time, or offer a Skip button in 5 seconds (which everyone clicks--enough that Skip Ad is a minor cultural phenomena and gets mentioned in any media playing on frustration with streaming services in general, not just YouTube).
People don't care about that shit.
Napster was originally a robust, decentralized p2p network for sharing entire directories full of individual files. Unlike bittorrent (sharing a torrent context), Napster would find a file of the same size, name, and content and transfer that. Its demise spawned Kazaa, Limewire, Gnutella, Edonkey, and such.
Most modern music players can ID songs, determine the relevant album, and provide cover art. Rhythmbox can even supply lyrics; I think e.g. Banshee does similar. Amazon is selling MP3s without other crap attached.
While that's true, Napster and Gnutella were easier than anything I've used, and probably easier than anything possible. Spotify is about as easy, except I have to pay for Spotify.
Do you think anyone today outside a few eccentrics would buy music online if Napster hadn't been stopped? The music industry never stopped piracy, but they stopped the spread of such simple tools as a household item. Don't tell me Bittorrent is anything like opening an application, punching in something (Metallica, Avengers, Windows Enterprise Cracked), and downloading; I've used Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay and Google and Nutorrent and all the rest, and it's nice when you try to download Ubuntu and they give you a .torrent to use, and horrendous if you're hunting for something specific.
That's the victory they achieved: they stopped the ubiquity of free music, swapping from person to person, on every phone, on every tablet, on every PC, everywhere, with services like iTunes and Netflix being universally met with confusion at why such a thing would exist. They're now trying to stamp out what amounts to an underground coal mine fire: out of sight, irrelevant to 99.999% of the world, and impossible to stop with any amount of force.
How do you offer a better product at better than free? People obviously want the artist's product; and a rational person wants that product for the lowest price.
Windows 10 is the first Windows I've bothered to use much. I tried XP for a while and went back to Mandrake. Vista was dog balls. 7 was back to being XP. 8.1 was absolute garbage; I used it for Unity 3D for a while. Windows 10 surprised me by having a modern, useful interface with surprisingly-fewer flaws than all prior versions of Windows (useless Start menu search; Virtual desktops don't allow me to ctrl-alt-shift move windows; no exploded workspace view a la Gnome 3, although the alt-tab interface is better than Gnome 3), and by being an actual, competent OS.
Soon I'll get rid of Cygwin in favor of Ubuntu on Windows 10.
If it could just act as an iSCSI initiator at the home desktop level, I'd run it on a diskless machine with a cheap, low-capacity M2 and use FreeNAS to back its main program and data drive. Too bad the Windows installer can't do sensible things like mount a disk over C:\Program Files.
Internet included in rent (mounting a cost of $2 per unit diffused through the renters) and, especially, low-cost Internet are impossible. I know this because everyone rails on my Citizen's Dividend plan for being so horrible as to put the jobless, homeless, unemployed into small apartments with food and clean water but, horrifically, NO MONEY FOR INTERNET, dooming them to a life without cat pictures which is infinitely worse than eating out of people's garbage.
You hack their computer and you don't get extradited for it if they find out.
If you have the private key, you can listen in on encryption. If you do some monkey business in the protocol, you can make a passive eaves drop impossible even in this situation; in which case, if you have the private key, you can insert yourself in the network path and mediate the conversation, thus accessing the plaintext while posing as the end server in a way the client is 100% incapable of identifying and unable to mitigate.
Having one end hand over the keys does, in fact, completely remove end-to-end encryption for that eavesdropper.
TLS has unique challenges in this regard.
In theory, a hostile Government can pressure the CA to provide a signature for a MITM certificate, although this is transparent (it's easily discovered if that certificate is ever revoked, and identifiable if the old certificate is known).
A hostile Government can pressure the end provider (e.g. Google) to submit their Private key, thus breaking TLS: the Client asks the Server for its Certificate, then uses that Certificate to dictate a session key (and client certificate) to the Server. A passive eavesdropper with the server's Private Key can decrypt this exchange.
The best I can come up with is the Client sends the Server a random public key, and the Server sends the Client a session key; then the hostile Government must use a MITM to break it. A passive eavesdropper can be stopped, but an active MITM can't.
Your endpoints have to be non-hostile for end-to-end encryption to work. If they're infiltrated, it doesn't work.
One of Marx's major ideals was that labor creates value, such that reducing labor was a great blow to the economy. If it took 10,000 hours to make a truck, that truck is less-valuable than one made by 5,000 hours of a man's labor. Thus Marx said we retain wealth by retaining employment, and that decreasing employment decreases the value of things and makes us poorer.
Your argument was in the same line of thinking: these workers, needed or not, should be brought back, because we should have workers. It's a supply-side (trickle-down) economics argument that follows pretty well with a certain set of Marxist economics.
Demand-side economics (Solow, Malthus) reflects the real world: jobs are created by consumer buying power (you buy things? Who makes, transports, and retails those things? Can they handle providing all these things? No? Guess we need more jobs!), and wealth is increased by making more things for the same wage-hours paid (that is: if the same number of working-hours produces twice as much stuff, then we are all able to buy ... twice as much stuff; we all make twice as much with our same time, we get paid the same for that same time, and we end up able to buy twice as much as a result).
I was pointing out that your every breath is either "Every human being is a fucking waste of space" or "look how awesome I am because I like animals", because you're an evil, self-centered psychopath.
Except that I've actually studied costs and you haven't. You've made up a bunch of conjecture, and I work with someone who rents micro-units.
That's ... interesting. Still, at a lower pressure, you're getting less oxygen (mg per kg of body weight) into your blood, in the same way that drinking a shot of moonshine is less alcohol than drinking 4 cans of beer and not diluted.
For a large enough driving pool in a localized area, you can determine statistical significance. Concentrated autonomous driving would tell you how well the cars drive with many other autonomous cars around; while having ~200,000 cars spread among the states would tell you how well they perform when surrounded almost entirely by standard, human-driven cars. This requires a large number of miles driven over a long span of time to generate sufficient data.
Dissimilar. An autonomous driver is a different kind of thing. CDL has all kinds of more-restrictive regulations on it because commercial drivers have a different level of training and general danger than passenger-vehicle drivers.
Demonstrating that a feature does not increase or actively decreases vehicular incidents builds a powerful case for reduced manufacturer liability. Demonstrating the improvement of that feature's safety benefits as a continuous process eliminates any legal standing for a negligence case. When the technology is normalized, defects outside normal variance then draw more scrutiny; with modern, widely-available technology greatly outperforming your own, you can only be found negligent.
That's itself dangerous, because then the car behaves unpredictably if that occurs. It's negative punishment, and it's been shown drivers will duct tape soda cans to the steering wheel to avoid this (because punishment has complex interactions with risk assessment, instead of blunt interactions with rewards reinforcement).
That depends on how you look at it.
An erroneous driver causes a collision of a given magnitude. Similarly, an erroneous computer system assisting the driver causes a collision of a given magnitude.
If, in the long run, the human driver causes more collisions and, in similar situations, a greater magnitude of damage for a given collision, what do you say about the computer assist? It depends on your political position.
If you want to attack the assist, you hyperfocus on the fact that it was active and failed to prevent a collision at all. That tiny, singular effect brings the full weight of responsibility onto the computer assist.
If you want to support the computer assist, you cite that drivers without the assist cause collisions with greater frequency and deadliness than drivers on the assist. In that view, you demonstrate that the assist caused a net reduction of collisions.
The second position is more honest, largely because you can't make that argument if the numbers show the opposite (unless you make up fake numbers).
In medicine, a great deal of attention is given to cancer screenings. Over half of all men over the age of 50 have prostate cancer, and most men die with prostate cancer. Prostate screenings can detect these cancers, and cannot identify which cancers will cause harm and which will go unnoticed entirely by the patient. The current understanding in the medical field is that the harm caused by unnecessary prostate cancer remediation is immense--impotence, sepsis, hormonal imbalances, chronic constipation, and even death--while the number of lives saved and the amount of good done at all is little more than a statistical error.
This means prostate screenings and remediation actively spread large amounts of harm across the patient base, and are essentially a form of quackery; yet the medical community holds that doctors should never be penalized for their judgment on performing a screening, and should not be forced to withhold screening at a patient's request, because it is unethical to block the judgment of a medical professional in a situation where he believes the potential benefit is high, and it is unethical to deny the patient a chance to make his own decisions about his own health. Those decisions may be perilous, but they are the patient's to make for the same reason we don't force vaccines on everyone (although that's quickly becoming a public health issue rather than a patient health issue, which changes the ethical dynamic).
The issue raised here is similarly complex and is of similar form. In any given situation, a human operator may cause a fatality that autopilot could prevent, and autopilot could cause a fatality that a human operator would have avoided; in the span of all situations, one of these causes more harm than the other. If you want to hold autopilot accountable simply because it was active this once in this situation, is it not then also as valid to sue and imprison for manslaughter a human operator who was negligent by not utilizing autopilot to prevent a collision?
It's a real thing.
Dry air also irritates the bronchial passages.
There's no such thing as non-toxic. Vitamin B1, consumed in any dose, won't absorb through your intestines; injected, it will seriously fuck you up in high concentrations. Water, drunk, will kill you by making your brain swell. Oxygen is deadly. Glucose is a vicious poison, and your body decays when you have too much of it in your blood; your pancreas constantly switches between insulin and glucagon release to bind blood sugar into glycogen and then release more sugar into your blood so your cells can consume it. Glyphosate is harmless at doses at which salt is harmful, and is fatally toxic at doses something like 3 times the toxic dose of table salt.
LC0 is the dose below which no adverse effects are demonstrated. Cyanide will kill you; less cyanide will make you violently ill; a very small concentration of cyanide will do NOTHING. Cyanide isn't non-toxic; you just didn't inhale enough of it.
The AHA, ACS, and CDC all have 50-year-old research and positions on these things. They lag behind modern science by an enormous margin.
In a study of 76,000 women, current and former smokers had statistically higher chances of lung cancer; exposure to second hand smoke showed NOTHING.
Studies that show links between second-hand smoke and disease are almost universally case-control, where you find someone who has a disease and ask if they were exposed to a potential cause. This kind of study overwhelmingly shows us that video games cause people to be violent psychopaths and should be abolished from society. Actual scientists involved in this kind of research have, for a *long* time, expected that the 7,300 lung cancers claimed caused by second-hand smoke might be more approximately ZERO.
Modern research can't find a link between nicotine in particular and heart disease, at all; nicotine is known to be non-carcinogenic at this point, but cigarettes have hundreds of toxic chemicals. The thing toxicologists know that you don't is those chemicals disperse in air and become laughably-minor doses, in the same way that eating a pound of salt WILL KILL YOU while drinking a half an ounce of automobile antifreeze won't do a damned thing to you. The thing CDC, AHA, and ACS know that you don't is they're not obligated to follow rigorous scientific standards; they have a mission, and they can use any flawed research available that was once generally-accepted and hasn't been firmly stamped out in the public mind to pursue that mission, as they can defend their "best judgement" as long as it's not well-known and well-accepted by the greater populous that they're wrong, and damn what the latest and most effective science says.
It's the same thing as red meat having NO SCIENTIFICALLY-VALID NEGATIVE HEALTH EFFECTS, while the Pork lobby had the campaign, "Pork: The Other White Meat" in the height of the red meat health scare because pork is red meat (nutritionally), but considered white meat in a culinary sense (they found a legal way to falsely market pork as a healthy alternative to red meat when it is, in fact, red meat).
We call this "critical thinking".
Who with any credibility has suggested this?
Picketty. Note that "credibility" includes people like Ben Carson, who has said many things about economics (not this in particular) which people lauded, but which are wrong; Bernie Sanders also has credibility for the same reasons, as does Trump. That is: they're famous people who are deferred to because we see them as people who have important opinions on the matter.
If you want merit, the answer is Picketty has no merit (he's an economist whose grasp of economics is shitty); Bernie has no merit (his grasp of economics is shitty); Trump has no merit (he's a businessman; this doesn't translate to economics). Krugman has merit, and is also wrong, a lot (his grasp of modern theories is decent, and he doesn't go off in loony land like Picketty; just modern theories, like all theories, always, forever, are defective and will be improved in the future into less-defective theories).
I didn't read the rest of your manifesto because if you cannot contruct reasonable strawmen then the rest of your numbers are likely equally bad.
This is itself an unreasonable strawman argument: you disagree with a statement which is well-known and has been repeated again and again in the media and by various (lunatic) political candidates and economists who are taken wholly seriously, and claim that pointing out this lunacy eliminates all credibility from all statements made.