On Slashdot, people will tell you that managers are all dufuses and that "management" is where we stick retards to be unproductive and overpaid. They will then extoll the virtues of doing everything ad-hoc.
Real managers will also talk about how project management is ridiculous bullshit, and extoll the virtues of doing everything ad-hoc to be "agile" (that's not what "agile" means...).
Actually, economic impacts can be far more damning than a space shuttle with seven people on it exploding in a fireball. Taxes are up 1%? Some more people won't be able to afford medicine, heating, food. There will be a number of additionally infirm or unemployed, maybe a dozen, maybe a few tens of thousands. Through both direct and indirect effect, many people could die of disease or starvation.
People could not only die because the Web sites didn't work; but they could die because the Web sites cost 10 times as much as they should have to produce.
Nobody said that. Pelosi said we have to pass the bill "so *you* can see what's in it." The normal quote is made to show that Congress didn't know what was in it; but Pelosi was addressing the constituency and trying to imply that they don't know what a bill is about until the changes start happening in real life--that we don't know how the bill will affect us until it's passed, and so all the media hooplah is just noise we shouldn't concern ourselves with.
Salon isn't considered a credible source, but I can't figure out why. Usually the fact trail behind their articles is there if you look. Sure there's a lot of lunatic ranting and all; but what part is actually untrue?
There's an article on Salon about "warrior cops", with the SWAT team being used to run all kinds of basic shit. Checking your liquor license? SWAT team raid. One guy got shot hosting a gambling game with friends in his basement, $50 in the pot... it's like a $25 fine in his state, he's had the cops knock on his door like a dozen times and fine him and break up his parties. This time the SWAT team showed up and he got shot and died. The back story was right there in the salon article--he's been told a hell of a lot of times by the police to not do this--but that doesn't really explain why a fucking paramilitary force was sent to his house.
That's what I've come to expect from Salon: politically charged raving with all the 'i's dotted and 't's crossed. I'm still trying to figure out why people don't find Salon to be a high-quality editorial source (it's not really news). Seems on par with WSJ and Chicago Times (?.. I forget if it was CT, I remember Chicago did have a higher-end editorial piece I found very readable like WSJ). Rolling Stone has a few gems but mostly bores me with content.
This. I was more thinking that there are enough government pawns producing papers on human-made global warming (if you dissent, we pull your funding). Studying cyclical climate change will either provide evidence that the government mouthpiece speaks lies; or it will provide a baseline and show a major deviation in recent times that cannot be readily explained by a cyclical climate. Either way, it's valuable research.
Oh, helmets reduce risk as a mitigation; they don't eliminate any problem.
The only risk helmets mitigate is skull fracture from blunt skull impact when control of the vehicle is lost, either by internal (i.e. cyclist is texting inappropriately) or external (i.e. some idiot crashes into your bike) factors. This is not 100% mitigation; it's a certain percentage probability reduction based on impact force, and there's a huge variation in exact mode of impact that affects this--look at Snell 95A bicycle helmet testing procedures, the helmet has to handle a dozen types of impacts and neither allow force into the skull nor slip.
Helmets still leave a reduced risk of skull fracture, as well as doing nothing to protect against concussion, neck fracture, other broken bones, joint dislocation, or skin and muscle damage. For higher-risk environments (mountain biking, especially at high speeds), bigger helmets, goggles, and body armor exist.
Rather than riding around in armor, road cycling risks are mitigated by bicyclists and drivers following standard, predictable behavior that mitigates risk and leaves better openings for ad-hoc contingencies. When drivers or cyclists do not follow these behaviors, risk increases greatly and rapidly. Helmets don't correct this; they are mitigation for the extremely high severity risk event terminating with skull fracture, which is roughly as probable as any other injury from a serious collision (less serious collisions tend to go as far as bruises on the body; higher speeds reduce ability for the cyclist to reposition the body prior to impact), but is immediately fatal whereas even a broken neck might not be a big deal. That is a very small portion of the risk surface that cyclists are exposed to.
You're 23. You put your dick in a 17 year old girl.
You go to jail for 25 years.
Everyone else who was 23 at the time gets careers. They have savings. They buy cars, rent or buy houses. They have relationships, girlfriends. They get hobbies, they see movies. Some of them learn other languages and explore the world. They have children. Some have grandchildren now.
You, being 48, are dumped back on the street, no money, no car, no house, no property, middle aged. You're dirty and homeless. You're a sex offender because you fucked someone 6 years younger than you. Even if you weren't a dirty street rat, that hot 48 year old that just walked by you won't date you because you fucked a girl 6 years younger than you 25 years ago; she's on her way to meet a 21 year old college guy and cougar the shit out of him.
Welfare won't help you; you'll still be broke and unemployable. And a pedophile. Maybe you can be a drug dealer?
If you do dig yourself out of it, you can either get a girlfriend in the short-term who is probably not a great person... who would date a 48 year old freebird with no career and no money, on welfare? In 3-5 years, when you're 51-53, maybe you'll be stable enough to start dating real women.
If they aren't single and living the cougar life.
Or that could be your thing. Get hard listening to your new wife talk about all these young college studs she's been fucking.
You are a fucking retarded asshole and I am going to punch you in the fucking mouth for wasting my time with your stupid drivel. That's not revenge; you'll walk away from it, so it's _defined_ as punishment.
Punishment, n.: the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense.
Death is a penalty. It's called the "Death Penalty".
No, I mean "to save 3 or 4 murderers". EU withholds the drug we use to kill them, so we don't kill them. On the other hand, we also don't perform millions of surgeries, many of which are life-saving; some people end up with crippling permanent damage "if only we had done something 6 months ago" style, and others just end up dead.
It's like if the US withheld rice from Iran. Shipping 40 million pounds of rice to a company with an evil dictator who beheads homosexuals? Let's starve the dictator and the 1000 people who serve his rule and go around chopping heads off women and queers. Sure, 20 million innocents will starve, too, but who cares? We're not going to feed that evil dick Amajinedad!
Obamacare and Clintoncare and basically any major public healthcare "plan" in general in the US and the entire issue for the past two decades is a really easy example of "Let's not try to build Rome in a day". Everyone wants a complete solution to every problem and they want it right now and they want it free. Major traffic law changes or major healthcare reform in any form, it doesn't matter; you need better planning than that.
The big problem with healthcare is that poor people can't provide for themselves, and charities don't cover everyone (or they don't know how to get at charity money). Free clinical care isn't a "poor people should have access to healthcare just like rich people" solution; it's a "we have problems with healthcare, but the biggest problem is small injuries becoming debilitating or infectious when not treated, along with STD testing and vaccinations costing money; fixing these will eliminate 50% of the major healthcare issues for 1% of the economic cost of trying to address 95% of all issues, so maybe we should try to do that instead of trying to make sure that homeless people have exactly the same coverage as politicians and CEOs." And let's be honest: I don't want HIV from some rich California girl who got it from her hot room mate who hooked up with some hot chick he met in a dive bar who got it from some dude she met in the hood who got it from a hooker who probably got it from a multi-million-dollar CEO who doesn't really care. The rich californian girl and the CEO are negligent; the rest of this line is probably just incapable of affording the $200 STD test.
Whenever you see half a solution, consider: we can implement the other half later.
May it cause the powers that be to rethink ending a person's life out of some misguided and ultimately incorrect notion of "deterrence".
Deterrence is not proven. It's been shown that an area without the death penalty over here has lower murder rates than an area with the death penalty over there, in the US, 1000 miles away. That's great, but lots of lurking variables to cast doubt on the "deterrent" theory. On the other hand, there are states which abolished the death penalty, then re-instated it 2 years later because of a quadruple in the murder rate--potentially coincidental, but it does cast doubt on the "not a deterrent" theory. Then there's of course the reverse of the first issue, where we see states that have the death penalty and also have the lowest murder rates in the country (Texas has one of the lowest, but also open carry and the highest justifiable homicide rate; VA also has execution and open carry).
Imagine if the US holds strong and executes the 3 or 4 people it does each year anyway. Then the EU makes good on its threats. Then the millions who need life saving surgery every year can't get the anesthetics they need. Then hundreds of thousands or millions of innocents die to save 3 or 4 murderers.
Punishment is not something you can eventually walk away from. Two months in jail is going to cause major social and financial impacts; five years could be life destroying; twenty years in jail is an execution, just a more painful one that keeps around the animate shell of a former human being. A good, solid beating creates psychological damage that will never go away--the entire point is so that you won't do that shit ever again because you don't want another beating.
I like capital punishment for severe crimes with high confidence in conviction--if we all saw you walk into a shopping mall with a shotgun and pump 38 shells into the crowd, and we caught you trying to get out the door... you did it, and you're going to die. For petty crimes, I prefer corporal punishment; weeks and months of a man's life have far-reaching and uncontrollable implications, potentially affecting their employment, social life, and so on to unpredictable degrees.
Noopept and Piracetam are considered drugs by the FDA because they're modified; on the base, they're a modified amino acid. Notably, high doses aren't directly toxic (high doses of noopept can cause temporary psychosis though), same with L-Theanine. I also take DLPA, which starts causing nerve damage somewhere above 1500mg; I take 1000mg/day. DLPA and Caffeine are the riskiest* drugs I consume; I use DLPA to banish the side effects of caffeine (it prevents withdrawal).
The difference between a drug and a dietary supplement here is that the FDA will let you buy, sell, and possess unscheduled, unapproved drugs. They won't let you tell anyone what those drugs do, but they'll let you trade them. Dietary supplements... you can tell people Vitamin C cures colds and prevents heart disease; neither of these is true, but it's legal to label Vitamin C and anything containing Vitamin C as such. There's a drug called "axon" that's a plant extract used as a pesticide, highly toxic, used in small doses as a "nootropic" (like piracetam) but I don't believe it's neuroprotective (it has to actually prevent brain damage and cause its effects by brain chemistry modification to be nootropic; neurotoxins or vasodialators may be cognitive enhancers, but not nootropics). Because it's extracted from a natural source and not scheduled as a drug, you can tell people it's safe and effective for just about anything (these statements have not been verified by the FDA; this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition).
If you're wondering why I'm both obsessive about doing my fact-checking and risk assessment, yet willing to take what look like odd risks... welcome to the USA.
*I'm one of the 10% of bipolars that can become manic from SAM-e, and so I'll take 400mg doses of SAM-e spaced at least 5 hours apart to induce hypomania. This isn't a dangerous drug so much as dangerous behavior: I can and have accidentally induced mania or higher states of hypomania that were borderline, but that was by taking 800mg at once. Still, you could argue that that's higher risk in practice than Caffeine or DLPA, which have known, stable, and unchanging effects--it's possible for me to go straight to mania depending on diet, exercise, and general mood on a 400mg dose of SAM-e, but has never happened.
Re:I'm a cyclist too, and you're victim-blaming
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
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· Score: 1
There are a number of studies showing that pit bulls are dangerous too. But they're done by media reports, and the media doesn't care about not-pitbulls.
In my state, it wasn't considered the driver's fault until recently if the driver run over a cyclist. Hell, we just passed a law making vehicular manslaughter illegal; it took 8 years and went into effect October 2, 2012. Prior to that, vehicular manslaughter wasn't a crime; accidentally making a speed bump out of a cyclist was just... eh... you hit something, $50 fine.
Re:"do not want to ride after seeing ... injuries"
on
How Safe Is Cycling?
·
· Score: 1
A 15mph side-swipe from a mid-size sedan is going to knock me over about the same as if I skid my front wheel.
Unions were created when employers would rather kill 10 workers than spend $100 on a safety widget.
Employers would still rather do that, except that now they know re-staffing workers is expensive; and now we have government regulations and inspectors that make safety failures crippling (OSHA will shut down your business immediately, the minute the inspector decides it can't function as-is, until the issue is resolved and they have inspected and signed off on it).
Enclosed cars are much more impaired than open-top convertibles, which are more impaired than motorcycles, which are roughly on par with bicycles and pedestrians (pedestrians are probably the least impaired).
Let's not jump in all at once here. Maybe we can stretch a little further later. Like healthcare, specifying that hospital capacity/income requires them to provide so many hours of staffed free clinical care spread out over so much area around the hospital, with the area and the clinical care hours increasing as capacity increases. That should solve a huge amount of the nation's health care problems, and then we can worry about tackling the bigger and more risky health care problems from there. Jumping in all at once with some half-cocked idyllic plan-on-paper would be insanely risky.
Inside the US, anything that's derived from a "natural" source is a "dietary supplement". Look up L-Theanine (anxiolytic). Some companies sell outright poisons as "supplements". If Marijuana wasn't scheduled, THC would be a dietary supplement; likewise cocaine.
Side effects aren't binary. They're risk: probability x severity. The side effects of pizza include insomnia, anxiety, and headache... all that salt.
My point was you're claiming that in principle the existence of a contingency places a boundary on risk which cannot be reached by any other situation that doesn't have the contingency. In effect, you're claiming that something is much more likely to happen if you can't do anything about it.
This is false. It's like saying if we move to a planet in the Asteroid belt, we'll be up for fatal meteor impact 6 times per year; but also in the Asteroid belt we can leverage asteroids for our asteroid deflection technology, so we can do something about it, so we're much better off. Here on earth, we don't see a planet-killer but once in billions of years; but we're a lot more likely to be extincted because we don't have any way to get rid of one if it's coming, like by ramming another asteroid into it.
The problem with the above is that you're saying something bad likely to happen A LOT is less likely to cause a problem because you can stop it; whereas something bad likely to happen NOT AS MUCH is a lot worse because you can't do anything about it. Problem: how likely is your contingency action to fail? Multiplied by the number of events, is that more or less probable than the situation with no contingency?
You're saying you can dodge a car that's moving toward you if your bicycle is moving. I'm saying I've mitigated that problem by following actions that make it much less likely for me to be in that position in the first place. Your counter-claim is then that no amount of "less likely" can match your ability to dodge cars, which is an unsubstantiated claim. I highlighted the numbers as made-up because I wasn't substantiating; I was illustrating that such unsubstantiated claims can easily be wrong.
Dude, I'm better at risk assessment and management than most humans. You're in my realm. You wouldn't get into a fist fight with Poseiden on the sea, would you? Fuck no, you'd call him out for a fight in the middle of like Colorado away from the bay and the ocean and rivers and shit. He's going to have to throw a swimming pool at you or something, but there will be no tidal waves to crush your little body. Well guess what? You're trying to argue risk with someone who understands risk, and I'm fairly certain this isn't your element; you're just scared of what looks frightening to you, like a helicopter parent afraid that the Taliban might fly a plane into your child's school because it almost happened once, so you home school to protect your child from terrorist attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
Another researcher had a program that solved captchas with better accuracy years ago. He didn't release it "for the common good".
Look at the success Europe had...
zero REAL project management experience
On Slashdot, people will tell you that managers are all dufuses and that "management" is where we stick retards to be unproductive and overpaid. They will then extoll the virtues of doing everything ad-hoc.
Real managers will also talk about how project management is ridiculous bullshit, and extoll the virtues of doing everything ad-hoc to be "agile" (that's not what "agile" means...).
Actually, economic impacts can be far more damning than a space shuttle with seven people on it exploding in a fireball. Taxes are up 1%? Some more people won't be able to afford medicine, heating, food. There will be a number of additionally infirm or unemployed, maybe a dozen, maybe a few tens of thousands. Through both direct and indirect effect, many people could die of disease or starvation.
People could not only die because the Web sites didn't work; but they could die because the Web sites cost 10 times as much as they should have to produce.
Nobody said that. Pelosi said we have to pass the bill "so *you* can see what's in it." The normal quote is made to show that Congress didn't know what was in it; but Pelosi was addressing the constituency and trying to imply that they don't know what a bill is about until the changes start happening in real life--that we don't know how the bill will affect us until it's passed, and so all the media hooplah is just noise we shouldn't concern ourselves with.
Still an idiotic statement.
Let's eliminate the Federal Government.
Salon isn't considered a credible source, but I can't figure out why. Usually the fact trail behind their articles is there if you look. Sure there's a lot of lunatic ranting and all; but what part is actually untrue?
There's an article on Salon about "warrior cops", with the SWAT team being used to run all kinds of basic shit. Checking your liquor license? SWAT team raid. One guy got shot hosting a gambling game with friends in his basement, $50 in the pot... it's like a $25 fine in his state, he's had the cops knock on his door like a dozen times and fine him and break up his parties. This time the SWAT team showed up and he got shot and died. The back story was right there in the salon article--he's been told a hell of a lot of times by the police to not do this--but that doesn't really explain why a fucking paramilitary force was sent to his house.
That's what I've come to expect from Salon: politically charged raving with all the 'i's dotted and 't's crossed. I'm still trying to figure out why people don't find Salon to be a high-quality editorial source (it's not really news). Seems on par with WSJ and Chicago Times (?.. I forget if it was CT, I remember Chicago did have a higher-end editorial piece I found very readable like WSJ). Rolling Stone has a few gems but mostly bores me with content.
This. I was more thinking that there are enough government pawns producing papers on human-made global warming (if you dissent, we pull your funding). Studying cyclical climate change will either provide evidence that the government mouthpiece speaks lies; or it will provide a baseline and show a major deviation in recent times that cannot be readily explained by a cyclical climate. Either way, it's valuable research.
Oh, helmets reduce risk as a mitigation; they don't eliminate any problem.
The only risk helmets mitigate is skull fracture from blunt skull impact when control of the vehicle is lost, either by internal (i.e. cyclist is texting inappropriately) or external (i.e. some idiot crashes into your bike) factors. This is not 100% mitigation; it's a certain percentage probability reduction based on impact force, and there's a huge variation in exact mode of impact that affects this--look at Snell 95A bicycle helmet testing procedures, the helmet has to handle a dozen types of impacts and neither allow force into the skull nor slip.
Helmets still leave a reduced risk of skull fracture, as well as doing nothing to protect against concussion, neck fracture, other broken bones, joint dislocation, or skin and muscle damage. For higher-risk environments (mountain biking, especially at high speeds), bigger helmets, goggles, and body armor exist.
Rather than riding around in armor, road cycling risks are mitigated by bicyclists and drivers following standard, predictable behavior that mitigates risk and leaves better openings for ad-hoc contingencies. When drivers or cyclists do not follow these behaviors, risk increases greatly and rapidly. Helmets don't correct this; they are mitigation for the extremely high severity risk event terminating with skull fracture, which is roughly as probable as any other injury from a serious collision (less serious collisions tend to go as far as bruises on the body; higher speeds reduce ability for the cyclist to reposition the body prior to impact), but is immediately fatal whereas even a broken neck might not be a big deal. That is a very small portion of the risk surface that cyclists are exposed to.
You're 23. You put your dick in a 17 year old girl.
You go to jail for 25 years.
Everyone else who was 23 at the time gets careers. They have savings. They buy cars, rent or buy houses. They have relationships, girlfriends. They get hobbies, they see movies. Some of them learn other languages and explore the world. They have children. Some have grandchildren now.
You, being 48, are dumped back on the street, no money, no car, no house, no property, middle aged. You're dirty and homeless. You're a sex offender because you fucked someone 6 years younger than you. Even if you weren't a dirty street rat, that hot 48 year old that just walked by you won't date you because you fucked a girl 6 years younger than you 25 years ago; she's on her way to meet a 21 year old college guy and cougar the shit out of him.
Welfare won't help you; you'll still be broke and unemployable. And a pedophile. Maybe you can be a drug dealer?
If you do dig yourself out of it, you can either get a girlfriend in the short-term who is probably not a great person... who would date a 48 year old freebird with no career and no money, on welfare? In 3-5 years, when you're 51-53, maybe you'll be stable enough to start dating real women.
If they aren't single and living the cougar life.
Or that could be your thing. Get hard listening to your new wife talk about all these young college studs she's been fucking.
How's rehabilitation working for you?
You are a fucking retarded asshole and I am going to punch you in the fucking mouth for wasting my time with your stupid drivel. That's not revenge; you'll walk away from it, so it's _defined_ as punishment.
Punishment, n.: the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense.
Death is a penalty. It's called the "Death Penalty".
No, I mean "to save 3 or 4 murderers". EU withholds the drug we use to kill them, so we don't kill them. On the other hand, we also don't perform millions of surgeries, many of which are life-saving; some people end up with crippling permanent damage "if only we had done something 6 months ago" style, and others just end up dead.
It's like if the US withheld rice from Iran. Shipping 40 million pounds of rice to a company with an evil dictator who beheads homosexuals? Let's starve the dictator and the 1000 people who serve his rule and go around chopping heads off women and queers. Sure, 20 million innocents will starve, too, but who cares? We're not going to feed that evil dick Amajinedad!
Obamacare and Clintoncare and basically any major public healthcare "plan" in general in the US and the entire issue for the past two decades is a really easy example of "Let's not try to build Rome in a day". Everyone wants a complete solution to every problem and they want it right now and they want it free. Major traffic law changes or major healthcare reform in any form, it doesn't matter; you need better planning than that.
The big problem with healthcare is that poor people can't provide for themselves, and charities don't cover everyone (or they don't know how to get at charity money). Free clinical care isn't a "poor people should have access to healthcare just like rich people" solution; it's a "we have problems with healthcare, but the biggest problem is small injuries becoming debilitating or infectious when not treated, along with STD testing and vaccinations costing money; fixing these will eliminate 50% of the major healthcare issues for 1% of the economic cost of trying to address 95% of all issues, so maybe we should try to do that instead of trying to make sure that homeless people have exactly the same coverage as politicians and CEOs." And let's be honest: I don't want HIV from some rich California girl who got it from her hot room mate who hooked up with some hot chick he met in a dive bar who got it from some dude she met in the hood who got it from a hooker who probably got it from a multi-million-dollar CEO who doesn't really care. The rich californian girl and the CEO are negligent; the rest of this line is probably just incapable of affording the $200 STD test.
Whenever you see half a solution, consider: we can implement the other half later.
May it cause the powers that be to rethink ending a person's life out of some misguided and ultimately incorrect notion of "deterrence".
Deterrence is not proven. It's been shown that an area without the death penalty over here has lower murder rates than an area with the death penalty over there, in the US, 1000 miles away. That's great, but lots of lurking variables to cast doubt on the "deterrent" theory. On the other hand, there are states which abolished the death penalty, then re-instated it 2 years later because of a quadruple in the murder rate--potentially coincidental, but it does cast doubt on the "not a deterrent" theory. Then there's of course the reverse of the first issue, where we see states that have the death penalty and also have the lowest murder rates in the country (Texas has one of the lowest, but also open carry and the highest justifiable homicide rate; VA also has execution and open carry).
Imagine if the US holds strong and executes the 3 or 4 people it does each year anyway. Then the EU makes good on its threats. Then the millions who need life saving surgery every year can't get the anesthetics they need. Then hundreds of thousands or millions of innocents die to save 3 or 4 murderers.
That's how civilized societies work.
Long enough to make their life not worth living anymore anyway.
Where does this "civilized" assumption come from?
Join the Civilized world of Ancient Greece and include children and the neighbors in your sexual activities!
Punishment is not something you can eventually walk away from. Two months in jail is going to cause major social and financial impacts; five years could be life destroying; twenty years in jail is an execution, just a more painful one that keeps around the animate shell of a former human being. A good, solid beating creates psychological damage that will never go away--the entire point is so that you won't do that shit ever again because you don't want another beating.
I like capital punishment for severe crimes with high confidence in conviction--if we all saw you walk into a shopping mall with a shotgun and pump 38 shells into the crowd, and we caught you trying to get out the door... you did it, and you're going to die. For petty crimes, I prefer corporal punishment; weeks and months of a man's life have far-reaching and uncontrollable implications, potentially affecting their employment, social life, and so on to unpredictable degrees.
Hey, solution: Execute those DAs.
Noopept and Piracetam are considered drugs by the FDA because they're modified; on the base, they're a modified amino acid. Notably, high doses aren't directly toxic (high doses of noopept can cause temporary psychosis though), same with L-Theanine. I also take DLPA, which starts causing nerve damage somewhere above 1500mg; I take 1000mg/day. DLPA and Caffeine are the riskiest* drugs I consume; I use DLPA to banish the side effects of caffeine (it prevents withdrawal).
The difference between a drug and a dietary supplement here is that the FDA will let you buy, sell, and possess unscheduled, unapproved drugs. They won't let you tell anyone what those drugs do, but they'll let you trade them. Dietary supplements... you can tell people Vitamin C cures colds and prevents heart disease; neither of these is true, but it's legal to label Vitamin C and anything containing Vitamin C as such. There's a drug called "axon" that's a plant extract used as a pesticide, highly toxic, used in small doses as a "nootropic" (like piracetam) but I don't believe it's neuroprotective (it has to actually prevent brain damage and cause its effects by brain chemistry modification to be nootropic; neurotoxins or vasodialators may be cognitive enhancers, but not nootropics). Because it's extracted from a natural source and not scheduled as a drug, you can tell people it's safe and effective for just about anything (these statements have not been verified by the FDA; this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or condition).
If you're wondering why I'm both obsessive about doing my fact-checking and risk assessment, yet willing to take what look like odd risks... welcome to the USA.
*I'm one of the 10% of bipolars that can become manic from SAM-e, and so I'll take 400mg doses of SAM-e spaced at least 5 hours apart to induce hypomania. This isn't a dangerous drug so much as dangerous behavior: I can and have accidentally induced mania or higher states of hypomania that were borderline, but that was by taking 800mg at once. Still, you could argue that that's higher risk in practice than Caffeine or DLPA, which have known, stable, and unchanging effects--it's possible for me to go straight to mania depending on diet, exercise, and general mood on a 400mg dose of SAM-e, but has never happened.
There are a number of studies showing that pit bulls are dangerous too. But they're done by media reports, and the media doesn't care about not-pitbulls.
In my state, it wasn't considered the driver's fault until recently if the driver run over a cyclist. Hell, we just passed a law making vehicular manslaughter illegal; it took 8 years and went into effect October 2, 2012. Prior to that, vehicular manslaughter wasn't a crime; accidentally making a speed bump out of a cyclist was just... eh... you hit something, $50 fine.
A 15mph side-swipe from a mid-size sedan is going to knock me over about the same as if I skid my front wheel.
Unions were created when employers would rather kill 10 workers than spend $100 on a safety widget.
Employers would still rather do that, except that now they know re-staffing workers is expensive; and now we have government regulations and inspectors that make safety failures crippling (OSHA will shut down your business immediately, the minute the inspector decides it can't function as-is, until the issue is resolved and they have inspected and signed off on it).
Enclosed cars are much more impaired than open-top convertibles, which are more impaired than motorcycles, which are roughly on par with bicycles and pedestrians (pedestrians are probably the least impaired).
Let's not jump in all at once here. Maybe we can stretch a little further later. Like healthcare, specifying that hospital capacity/income requires them to provide so many hours of staffed free clinical care spread out over so much area around the hospital, with the area and the clinical care hours increasing as capacity increases. That should solve a huge amount of the nation's health care problems, and then we can worry about tackling the bigger and more risky health care problems from there. Jumping in all at once with some half-cocked idyllic plan-on-paper would be insanely risky.
Inside the US, anything that's derived from a "natural" source is a "dietary supplement". Look up L-Theanine (anxiolytic). Some companies sell outright poisons as "supplements". If Marijuana wasn't scheduled, THC would be a dietary supplement; likewise cocaine.
Side effects aren't binary. They're risk: probability x severity. The side effects of pizza include insomnia, anxiety, and headache... all that salt.
My point was you're claiming that in principle the existence of a contingency places a boundary on risk which cannot be reached by any other situation that doesn't have the contingency. In effect, you're claiming that something is much more likely to happen if you can't do anything about it.
This is false. It's like saying if we move to a planet in the Asteroid belt, we'll be up for fatal meteor impact 6 times per year; but also in the Asteroid belt we can leverage asteroids for our asteroid deflection technology, so we can do something about it, so we're much better off. Here on earth, we don't see a planet-killer but once in billions of years; but we're a lot more likely to be extincted because we don't have any way to get rid of one if it's coming, like by ramming another asteroid into it.
The problem with the above is that you're saying something bad likely to happen A LOT is less likely to cause a problem because you can stop it; whereas something bad likely to happen NOT AS MUCH is a lot worse because you can't do anything about it. Problem: how likely is your contingency action to fail? Multiplied by the number of events, is that more or less probable than the situation with no contingency?
You're saying you can dodge a car that's moving toward you if your bicycle is moving. I'm saying I've mitigated that problem by following actions that make it much less likely for me to be in that position in the first place. Your counter-claim is then that no amount of "less likely" can match your ability to dodge cars, which is an unsubstantiated claim. I highlighted the numbers as made-up because I wasn't substantiating; I was illustrating that such unsubstantiated claims can easily be wrong.
Dude, I'm better at risk assessment and management than most humans. You're in my realm. You wouldn't get into a fist fight with Poseiden on the sea, would you? Fuck no, you'd call him out for a fight in the middle of like Colorado away from the bay and the ocean and rivers and shit. He's going to have to throw a swimming pool at you or something, but there will be no tidal waves to crush your little body. Well guess what? You're trying to argue risk with someone who understands risk, and I'm fairly certain this isn't your element; you're just scared of what looks frightening to you, like a helicopter parent afraid that the Taliban might fly a plane into your child's school because it almost happened once, so you home school to protect your child from terrorist attacks.