Al Gore's prediction was the ice would be gone in 2014. That doesn't square with "much faster."
Isn't it about time to throw Al Gore and his movie under the bus on behalf of..... umm..... less easily refuted alarmism?
Where did Al Gore predict that polar ice would be gone in 2014? In 'An Inconvenient Truth' he says that there were two major studies showing that the arctic ocean, which he refers to as the polar ice cap, would be ice free in the summer in 50 to 70 years. Using Google I could not find anything where Gore was predicting that the polar ice caps would be gone by 2014.
Do you really believe that preventing legitimate Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. will prevent a single existing terrorist from an organization like ISIS from entering the U.S.? Even if no Syrian citizens are permitted to enter the U.S., terrorist organizations will pick another route to enter the U.S. Fake passports are not that difficult to come by. Hell, the Syrian passport found near the body of one of the Paris suicide bombers was a fake. Serbian police arrested a man Saturday with the same passport information except for the photo. But why even bother with coming in with false passport when you can use nationals who are already in place. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, stated, “Let me underline—the profile of the terrorists so far identified tells us this is an internal threat. It is all EU citizens so far. This can change with the hours, but so far it is quite clear it is an issue of internal domestic security."
How does one become qualified to oversee complex research? What are the qualifications? Does one have to be an expert in the branch of research they are overseeing, or is any political hack qualified?
Disney management will simply wait for the uproar to die down and then start setting vague and aggressive performance objectives for the U.S. workers. They'll then get rid of people via performance review. Workers who had formerly been getting good reviews will suddenly find themselves on notice for not measuring up in Disney's new high performance culture.
While I think people should be allowed to alter their consciousness using the substance of their choice, it is important to recognize that different addictions are not equivalent in their effects on individuals, people close to them, or society at large. An addiction to caffeine or chocolate doesn't result in the sort of disruptions to families and communities that addiction to alcohol and opiates does. Alcoholism almost always results in people hurting those around them. An addiction to chocolate, not so much.
But certain caring individuals, mostly at insurance companies, don't like paying for his treatment since it's expensive. And yes, they've recommended and tried to convince him to move to Washington and off himself. In my mind, if you're going to legalize it, that sort of behavior should be a felony.
What insurance companies were these individuals working for? What do they do, call up your father and tell him air fare to Seattle is pretty cheap this time of year? You said people who worked for insurance companies, plural, encouraged your father to move to Washington state, that's pretty amazing, really nearly unbelievable, that people at multiple insurance companies are urging your father to off himself. My wife has been an oncology nurse for forty years. She's had to deal with hundreds and hundreds of people who died, many of whom who took years to do it and cost the insurance companies bundles and bundles of money. I just asked her, and she's never known of a patient or their family say an insurance company encouraged someone to move to a state that has assisted suicide for terminally ill people.
My understanding is that only 10% of a book needs to be read to be counted as read. Without a minimum size for what counts as a book this subscription model seems like it favors authors who publish short books. If a book is only 50 pages long, only six pages of it need to be read in order for it to be counted as read. If I'm paying by the individual book I'm more likely to pay attention to reviews before downloading a book. With a subscription model that only requires 10% of a book to be read in order for an author to get part of the pool it seems like authors of short crappy books get subsidized by better authors.
Since the comment I was replying to specifically stated, "Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection", I thought it was implicit that we were discussing mutations modifying a virus' mode of transmission.
I stated my reasons in my post. You've yet to present a case where a virus mutates and expands the ways in which it is transmitted. None of your examples accomplished that. Can you cite one example where it has been proven that a virus mutated and went from being transmitted by bodily fluids to airborne transmission via small particle dispersal? Viruses jumping from one species to another is well established. Viruses don't even need to mutate to do that. The point of all this is how likely is the variant of Ebola that we're dealing with to mutate and become transmissible in a way that would make it much more contagious. From what I've read that sort of mutation seems to be exceedingly rare and there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that the current Ebola epidemic will lead to such an occurrence. The final sentence in your post that I was replying to said,
Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection than via skin contact.
This whole thread from there down is what is the likelihood of that occurring. What is the likelihood that the current strain of Ebola that is being transmitted person to person will mutate in such a way that it becomes airborne. And by airborne we're talking about it becoming flu like, not being transmitted via large droplets in spit or mucous when a person sneezes. We're talking about small particle aerosol dispersion, like the flu or measles. While viruses undergo frequent mutation, some types of changes are more likely to occur than others. AIDS never became an airborne disease. Measles never became a mosquito borne disease. Yellow fever never became an airborne disease. Small pox didn't change its mode of transmission. If none of these ever changed their mode of transmission, despite millions and millions of more cases than we're likely to see from Ebola, why would the current strain of Ebola do so? What makes this current strain of Ebola an exception to what seems a general rule?
The point was that none of your examples represent a virus mutation causing a new mode of transmission. The Ebola one doesn't. The influenza one doesn't. The AIDS one doesn't.
For example, Ebola has made this transition to airborne transmission before. Influenza has been transmitted by diarrhea before. Bubonic Plague is another disease that has managed the transition to airborne transmission.
And of course, AIDS was readily transmitted by blood transfusion and shared needle use even though that's not its original mode of transmission.
So there's four examples right there, including Ebola itself.
The variety of Ebola that is suspected of being transmittable via small particle dispersal is the Reston variant. It has not been proven that the Reston variant is transmittable by small particle aerosol dispersion, just suspected. It's worth noting that the Reston variant is not pathological in humans. No humans who have acquired it have become ill.
The presence of influenza virus in children's diarrhea is not necessarily a new mode of transmission. It may have always been present but no one looked for it until very recently. Just as influenza has shown up in bird shit since forever, it doesn't seem unreasonable that it might be present in the diarrhea of children. From what I've been able to find out it does not appear that influenza has mutated and is being transmitted through a new mode.
Pneumonic plague is not a new mode of transmission, and the bacterium that causes it is the same as the one that is transmittable by insect bites. Besides, plague is not a virus.
AIDS has always transmitted via bodily fluids. Blood transfusions and shared needles are still transfer by bodily fluid.Every virus that can survive in the blood is transmittable by these means by default. None of the examples that you provided qualify as an example of a virus changing its mode of transmission.
Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection than via skin contact.
I have read that viruses don't change their mode of transmission. AIDS, for instance, despite hundreds of thousands of cases, never changed its mode of transmission. Perhaps what I read is wrong, so I'm wondering, how many viral diseases can you cite where the mode of transmission changed?
Both outcomes are very germane to the debate of whether or not to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Good statistics should be used to guide policy. When you say "both outcomes you've described mean nothing to dead people", that comes off to me in the same way as "think of the children" does. Law enforcement has various means to test impairment that may not be as definitive as a breathalyzer (whose accuracy is considered debatable by some), but are still good enough to determine if a person is fit to drive. Instead of banning marijuana, how about if we instead develop more effective means of determining if a person is fit to drive? It shouldn't matter whether a person is unfit to drive because of alcohol, pot, old age or blood pressure medication, they're still unfit to drive.
THC being present in a person's system is a poor indicator that they were high on THC at the time of an accident. THC can show up in drug tests for weeks after person last consumed it and the mental effects have long since dissipated. How many of those people with THC in their systems involved in accidents also had elevated levels of alcohol or other drugs in their systems? Rather than use a very inaccurate measure like the mere presence of THC in the blood, why not look at vehicular fatality rates in states that have legalized medical marijuana or legalized recreational marijuana? What happened to traffic fatality rates in California since it legalized medical marijuana? What has happened to traffic fatality rates in Colorado since legal recreational marijuana has been available?
Jenny McCarthy couldn't have done it without news and talk shows presenting her views as being just as valid as real medical experts. It isn't so much 'Thanks Jenny' as 'Thanks Oprah for being more interested in ratings than public health'.
Early on IBM made a lot of money off PCs. It made buckets of money from the original PC, the PC XT and the PC/AT. It was only after PCs became commodity items that IBM was unable to maintain their traditionally high profit margins.
If the only users of libraries were people who only read text, I would be OK with an all e-reader library. However, I've noticed that my local library's children section is well used, and a lot of those users are early readers and parents of early readers who take out books where the illustrations matter as much as the words. And many of those books are large format that don't do well in a smaller format. It seems like a library going to an all e-reader format is abandoning an awful lot of the books for early readers.
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Al Gore's prediction was the ice would be gone in 2014. That doesn't square with "much faster."
Isn't it about time to throw Al Gore and his movie under the bus on behalf of ..... umm ..... less easily refuted alarmism?
Where did Al Gore predict that polar ice would be gone in 2014? In 'An Inconvenient Truth' he says that there were two major studies showing that the arctic ocean, which he refers to as the polar ice cap, would be ice free in the summer in 50 to 70 years. Using Google I could not find anything where Gore was predicting that the polar ice caps would be gone by 2014.
Unemployment rates are not based on unemployment claims. They are based on a random survey of 60,000 households. Here's some information on how the various employment rates are calculated.
Do you really believe that preventing legitimate Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. will prevent a single existing terrorist from an organization like ISIS from entering the U.S.? Even if no Syrian citizens are permitted to enter the U.S., terrorist organizations will pick another route to enter the U.S. Fake passports are not that difficult to come by. Hell, the Syrian passport found near the body of one of the Paris suicide bombers was a fake. Serbian police arrested a man Saturday with the same passport information except for the photo. But why even bother with coming in with false passport when you can use nationals who are already in place. Federica Mogherini, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, stated, “Let me underline—the profile of the terrorists so far identified tells us this is an internal threat. It is all EU citizens so far. This can change with the hours, but so far it is quite clear it is an issue of internal domestic security."
How does one become qualified to oversee complex research? What are the qualifications? Does one have to be an expert in the branch of research they are overseeing, or is any political hack qualified?
Disney management will simply wait for the uproar to die down and then start setting vague and aggressive performance objectives for the U.S. workers. They'll then get rid of people via performance review. Workers who had formerly been getting good reviews will suddenly find themselves on notice for not measuring up in Disney's new high performance culture.
If someone lays out a couple of lines of coke and someone else snorts them, was the person snorting the coke in possession of it?
While I think people should be allowed to alter their consciousness using the substance of their choice, it is important to recognize that different addictions are not equivalent in their effects on individuals, people close to them, or society at large. An addiction to caffeine or chocolate doesn't result in the sort of disruptions to families and communities that addiction to alcohol and opiates does. Alcoholism almost always results in people hurting those around them. An addiction to chocolate, not so much.
It's the hydraulic fluid on the upholstery that will really piss you off.
But certain caring individuals, mostly at insurance companies, don't like paying for his treatment since it's expensive. And yes, they've recommended and tried to convince him to move to Washington and off himself. In my mind, if you're going to legalize it, that sort of behavior should be a felony.
What insurance companies were these individuals working for? What do they do, call up your father and tell him air fare to Seattle is pretty cheap this time of year? You said people who worked for insurance companies, plural, encouraged your father to move to Washington state, that's pretty amazing, really nearly unbelievable, that people at multiple insurance companies are urging your father to off himself. My wife has been an oncology nurse for forty years. She's had to deal with hundreds and hundreds of people who died, many of whom who took years to do it and cost the insurance companies bundles and bundles of money. I just asked her, and she's never known of a patient or their family say an insurance company encouraged someone to move to a state that has assisted suicide for terminally ill people.
My understanding is that only 10% of a book needs to be read to be counted as read. Without a minimum size for what counts as a book this subscription model seems like it favors authors who publish short books. If a book is only 50 pages long, only six pages of it need to be read in order for it to be counted as read. If I'm paying by the individual book I'm more likely to pay attention to reviews before downloading a book. With a subscription model that only requires 10% of a book to be read in order for an author to get part of the pool it seems like authors of short crappy books get subsidized by better authors.
Since the comment I was replying to specifically stated, "Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection", I thought it was implicit that we were discussing mutations modifying a virus' mode of transmission.
Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection than via skin contact.
This whole thread from there down is what is the likelihood of that occurring. What is the likelihood that the current strain of Ebola that is being transmitted person to person will mutate in such a way that it becomes airborne. And by airborne we're talking about it becoming flu like, not being transmitted via large droplets in spit or mucous when a person sneezes. We're talking about small particle aerosol dispersion, like the flu or measles. While viruses undergo frequent mutation, some types of changes are more likely to occur than others. AIDS never became an airborne disease. Measles never became a mosquito borne disease. Yellow fever never became an airborne disease. Small pox didn't change its mode of transmission. If none of these ever changed their mode of transmission, despite millions and millions of more cases than we're likely to see from Ebola, why would the current strain of Ebola do so? What makes this current strain of Ebola an exception to what seems a general rule?
The point was that none of your examples represent a virus mutation causing a new mode of transmission. The Ebola one doesn't. The influenza one doesn't. The AIDS one doesn't.
For example, Ebola has made this transition to airborne transmission before. Influenza has been transmitted by diarrhea before. Bubonic Plague is another disease that has managed the transition to airborne transmission. And of course, AIDS was readily transmitted by blood transfusion and shared needle use even though that's not its original mode of transmission. So there's four examples right there, including Ebola itself.
The variety of Ebola that is suspected of being transmittable via small particle dispersal is the Reston variant. It has not been proven that the Reston variant is transmittable by small particle aerosol dispersion, just suspected. It's worth noting that the Reston variant is not pathological in humans. No humans who have acquired it have become ill. The presence of influenza virus in children's diarrhea is not necessarily a new mode of transmission. It may have always been present but no one looked for it until very recently. Just as influenza has shown up in bird shit since forever, it doesn't seem unreasonable that it might be present in the diarrhea of children. From what I've been able to find out it does not appear that influenza has mutated and is being transmitted through a new mode. Pneumonic plague is not a new mode of transmission, and the bacterium that causes it is the same as the one that is transmittable by insect bites. Besides, plague is not a virus. AIDS has always transmitted via bodily fluids. Blood transfusions and shared needles are still transfer by bodily fluid.Every virus that can survive in the blood is transmittable by these means by default. None of the examples that you provided qualify as an example of a virus changing its mode of transmission.
Either possibility increases the likelihood that the disease mutates to become airborne which is a far more dangerous transmission mode of infection than via skin contact.
I have read that viruses don't change their mode of transmission. AIDS, for instance, despite hundreds of thousands of cases, never changed its mode of transmission. Perhaps what I read is wrong, so I'm wondering, how many viral diseases can you cite where the mode of transmission changed?
Both outcomes are very germane to the debate of whether or not to legalize marijuana for recreational use. Good statistics should be used to guide policy. When you say "both outcomes you've described mean nothing to dead people", that comes off to me in the same way as "think of the children" does. Law enforcement has various means to test impairment that may not be as definitive as a breathalyzer (whose accuracy is considered debatable by some), but are still good enough to determine if a person is fit to drive. Instead of banning marijuana, how about if we instead develop more effective means of determining if a person is fit to drive? It shouldn't matter whether a person is unfit to drive because of alcohol, pot, old age or blood pressure medication, they're still unfit to drive.
THC being present in a person's system is a poor indicator that they were high on THC at the time of an accident. THC can show up in drug tests for weeks after person last consumed it and the mental effects have long since dissipated. How many of those people with THC in their systems involved in accidents also had elevated levels of alcohol or other drugs in their systems? Rather than use a very inaccurate measure like the mere presence of THC in the blood, why not look at vehicular fatality rates in states that have legalized medical marijuana or legalized recreational marijuana? What happened to traffic fatality rates in California since it legalized medical marijuana? What has happened to traffic fatality rates in Colorado since legal recreational marijuana has been available?
Foxconn said its new "Foxbots" will cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 to make, but individually be able to build an average of 30,000 devices.
Does this mean that after building about 30,000 devices that a Foxbot will need to be overhauled or scrapped?
Not yet. The $15/hr minimum wage will go into effect over several years.
In most US states the highest paid public employee is a football or basketball coach.
Jenny McCarthy couldn't have done it without news and talk shows presenting her views as being just as valid as real medical experts. It isn't so much 'Thanks Jenny' as 'Thanks Oprah for being more interested in ratings than public health'.
IBM has a huge software group.
It hardly seems wild if there aren't wild things that can eat people in it.
Early on IBM made a lot of money off PCs. It made buckets of money from the original PC, the PC XT and the PC/AT. It was only after PCs became commodity items that IBM was unable to maintain their traditionally high profit margins.
If the only users of libraries were people who only read text, I would be OK with an all e-reader library. However, I've noticed that my local library's children section is well used, and a lot of those users are early readers and parents of early readers who take out books where the illustrations matter as much as the words. And many of those books are large format that don't do well in a smaller format. It seems like a library going to an all e-reader format is abandoning an awful lot of the books for early readers.