That doesn't make sense. Why would it matter if they could be sold or not? That economic value of treasuries is based on the assumption that the U.S. government pays its debts. The selling part just keeps you from having to wait until maturity.
I think confusion would be a very short-term problem. If they really did remove dollar bills from circulation, people would figure out the coins pretty quick. When they leave the bills in circulation and just circulate a few additional coins, then people are confused by the coins. They really just need to decide "do we want dollar coins or dollar bills?"
Personally, I really like the idea of dollar coins. I find the existence of coins in that price range for Euro and Pounds to be much more convenient than bills.
I think people would be more likely to let a few dollar coins sit around (in jars, drawers, etc.) than dollar bills. Only because bills are easier to carry around than coins. Sometimes you put all your coins somewhere out of convenience, and they sit there for longer than a bill would sit around. But this is a one-time thing. Any individual would tend to have a certain number of dollar coins sitting in a jar/drawer/etc. at any time. But it wouldn't grow over time.
In other words, right now I have no one-dollar-bills sitting in my dresser drawer. If we switched to coins, I wouldn't be surprised if at any time I didn't have 2-4 one-dollar-coins sitting in that drawer. So effectively, $2-4 dollars is out of circulation. But a year later, it's still the same $2-4. It didn't grow to $4-8.
The eBay/Intuit agreement (and the other similar agreements that were subject to a settlement a few years ago) were very broad in scope. It might be the breadth that is the issue.
I know, for instance, that it is legal for a company to agree not to solicit employees of another company for a defined period of time. This is often done as part of M&A transactions, where a company is buying a subsidiary of another company, and doesn't want the seller to just turn around and hire back key personnel. But those are limited in time. Also, the ones I've seen do not limit the ability to hire those people, only the ability to solicit them. So if the employee makes the first contact, all bets are off.
Another agreement I've seen often is as part of a M&A confidentiality agreement. Example: "You will provide us information about your company and access to key personnel in order to discuss a potential aquisition, in exchange, we agree not to solicit any of those employees for one year."
The eBay/Intuit agreement, however, is that they will not hire each others' employees for as long as the agreement remains in effect AND that it doesn't matter whether the employee approaches them first.
You also have to be careful when thinking about this due to the different conditions that could all be lumped into "vegetative states".
Someone with localized damage could appear vegetative, but really just be "locked in". In other words, they could have a largely intact brain, except for key regions blocking movement/communication. They would appear vegetative, but actually be able to react in ways that would show up in fMRI. This research could prove to be valid in such cases.
Someone like Teri Shiavo, though, is a whole different story. Her brain was so damaged that most of it was simply gone (damaged material is cleared out by the immune system). She mostly had a big empty cavity in her head filled with fluid. It's unlikely that fMRI would show any response in such a case. And even if it did, with that much damage it would be impossible to make any guess as to what that activity might mean.
The government in the U.S. solved a serious problem. But it doesn't get credit for solving the problem, because it only obeyed the will of the people. (So what? Didn't it still solve a 30-year old problem?) But in China government is not doing what the people want. So somehow that means all governments are bad.
You fail Logic 101.
Conversation over, since your ideology clearly trumps any attempt to make sense. Discourse under such conditions is simply not useful. Have fun living in your logic-free echo chamber.
There are A LOT of foreign medical schools. The only way to examine the curriculum is to go there and sit in on classes. And you couldn't wait until someone applied to move to the U.S. in order to do the review. Because what if they went to that school 10 years earlier? You'd have to know how good a medical school was 10 years ago. And what would you do about the fact that much of a doctor's practical medical training actually comes from internship and residency? For your proposal, the U.S. would have to have thousands of reviewers working around the world to determine the quality of medical education at med schools, internship programs and residency programs, just in case a decade later someone from one of those programs wanted to move to the U.S.
Isn't it easier to have some system to review the individual applicants?
1. Computer modeling points to T.Rex being slower than some of the animals we know it preyed on. Of course, the models could easily be wrong.
2. Chomp-and-wait against Triceratops only works if you're a stalker (T.Rex was too big for that) or an ambush predator (which was one of the options I suggested). You're probably not going to run down a Triceratops. It wouldn't run away. It would turn and defend itself. That's why I lean towards ambush predator. I just don't know enough about the vegetation to know if there was anywhere a T.Rex could really hide. Komodo Dragons get away with ambushing because there are bushes in its habitat big enough to hide in (and in spite of it's bulk, a Komodo is pretty low to the ground... easier to hide that way). I keep trying to figure out how T.Rex is gonna hide in some bushes. But if the bushes are big enough...
But another option against Triceratops is that T.Rex had some trick to avoiding those horns. That's why I suggested either social hunting or some kind of leaping move to get away from the horns. Even if it couldn't leap clear over Triceratops, maybe T.Rex could fake one direction, get Triceratops to commit, then quickly leap to the the other side, getting behind the crest and into position to bite Triceratops back. I'm just throwing ideas out at this point, though.
If you think drugs and medical devices aren't safer in the U.S. (and other developed countries with similar regulatory regimes) than in countries without FDA-like regimes, then you're just not paying attention.
But don't let facts get in the way of your ideology.
There are some problems that only government can fix. The market didn't stop GE from dumping PCBs in the Hudson river (which they'd been doing for 30 years), the government did. The market didn't stop Merck from selling Vioxx, the FDA did. Yes, Vioxx slipped through the FDA's system in the first place. That just means the system is not perfect. It doesn't mean we'd be better off without it.
Just because a regulatory regime does not result in a perfect outcome, doesn't mean it provides zero value to society. Not all approved drugs are perfectly safe. In fact, few drugs are perfectly safe. Tylenol is the only non-steroidal, non-opioid drug I can tolerate, for instance. For me, it's the safest option for treating pain (in suggested doses, Tylenol is less likely to create other problems than either steroid or opioid-based pain killers). Oxycontin has problems, but is still superior to many other opiate/opioid options.
As far as the illegal drugs, in my opinion there is room for legalizing some (if not all) of those. But isn't that a separate discussion topic from the costs/benefits of the FDA's regulatory regime in the healthcare market?
Besides, didn't these Triceratopses have soft underbellies and such? Seems to me that the neck and face bits would be the LAST to go, not the first.
I kind of agree with you here. It looks to me like all they showed was what the T.Rex does when it's time to go after the head/neck region. It does not necessarily show that it ate those parts first. However, I haven't seen the detailed study. It is possible that there is evidence that the head was first to be consumed. Maybe T.Rex sometimes abandoned the prey after eating the head/neck region. In such cases, T.Rex marks would only show up on the head/neck, while other scavengers' teeth would show up in the rest of the skeleton.
Or maybe there's other reason to believe they'd go for the head first. Maybe there's a lot of fat on the neck. Many large predators go for fat deposits first (calories), then organs (calories and micro-nutrients), then muscle (less-caloric macro-nutrients like protein).
I actually agree with your point. But the solution is not "no regulation". The solution is vigilance on the part of those who have influence over the regulatory bodies. To use another "TM", such vigilance is a Very Hard ThingTM, but is unfortunately the Only Reasonable SolutionTM.:-)
I object to the concept that if government just stopped regulating everything would be better. (Even Mitt Romney seems to agree with that point.)
But I also just as adamantly object to the concept that we can just throw in some more regulations and fix everything.
To give a completely unrelated example, there was plenty of regulatory authority in place for the government to have put a stop to the sometimes brain-dead and sometimes predatory lending practices that most people blame for the financial crisis. The U.S. did not need additional regulation after the financial crisis occurred. All the U.S. needed was for the regulators to exercise their authority against the most egregious of the mid-2000s lending practices. (May not have kept a recession from occurring, but would almost certainly have kept it from being the mess we have today.) Instead, what we have today are regulators that are just as timid about actually exercising judgement, but they now have a whole other layer of regulatory requirements they are responsible for. The worst of all worlds.
This is a good point. It's possible that many people with moderate hearing loss are overpaying for aids that are overkill for their condition. For people with more difficult to address conditions, though, the cheaper ones just don't cut it. My dad has severe tinitis, with associated hearing loss.* He tried hearing aids at all price levels. Only some very expensive ones worked well enough for him to even bother with (couple thousand dollars per ear, but I don't remember the exact price).
*Recent research into tinitis seems to lean towards the hypothesis that I worded that backwards. The old hypothesis was that the ringing sound makes it hard to hear in that range. The new hypothesis is that the ringing is a side-effect of losing hearing in that range -- i.e. it is the equivalent of phantom pain when a limb is severed.
And isn't that the whole problem with the structure of insurance? Consumers don't care about the cost because insurance picks it up anyway. "Sure, order that extra test", "don't give me generic, I want the name brand", etc. But the insurance company really passes the cost back right back to the consumers. So where's the part where someone says "that's too expensive, let's go with this other, cheaper, just-as-effective option". If the insurance company says it, then the customers complain about being screwed by a beaurocrat. But the customer really has little incentive to chose the just-as-good-but-cheaper option, because the extra cost doesn't directly affect his premium (it really gets spread out among all customers).
This is the point of the high-deductible insurance products: The high deductible means most day-to-day healthcare expenses entail expense to the consumer, so the consumer has incentive to keep these costs down. But the consumer is still insured in the case of larger expenses. But this still isn't a perfect outcome. In the perfect world, someone would develop a system of insurance that incentivizes the consumer, the doctor and the insurer to work together to find the optimum trade-offs between cost and outcome. None of the participants would have any incentive to spend any unnecessary money and none would have any incentive to fail to spend any necessary money. Hell if I know how to get to that, though.
Healthcare would be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it.
It would also be much less effective and much less safe.
The free market doesn't fix everything. In fact, the basis of the current regulatory regime regarding new drugs was originally put in place because a bunch of consumers were killed by a bad drug... with especially painful-sounding deaths... the company never performed any testing with the formulation... and should have known there was a problem in the first place. The story is: Massengil used diethylene glycol as a solvent for dissolving sulfanilamide into an elixir format. Diethylene glycol was a known poison, but the company's chemist wasn't aware of that. Even very simple animal testing would have found the problem.
So how about instead of ridiculing every action the government takes, we all get together and try to limit the useless actions and focus government on the useful ones? Requiring drugs to be tested and shown to be safe and effective is a Good ThingTM. Whether in the U.S. or in countries with weaker regulatory regimes, we've seen time and time again that the free market is simply not up to the task of keeping ineffective or even dangerous drugs from being peddled to consumers. However, some of the detail of how the FDA reviews drugs might be amenable to streamlining (I don't know enough detail to suggest how, but it seems almost certainly probable).
On the other hand, your description of Ear Trumpet's experience with the FDA seems like a Bad ThingTM.
I'll bet if you got 10 Republican and 10 Democratic congressmen together (and could somehow figure out a way of making them ignore the fact they were working together), you could find 20 ways that everyone would agree would streamline the FDA without materially affecting the quality of health care. In decades past I would have said the biggest impediment to such agreements was that no one in Washington really cares to put such effort into low-profile results. That still might be a problem today, but the bigger problem in Washington today is the part I put in parenthesis above -- not only is there a divide that makes it hard to work together, congressmen are actively disincentivized from working across the aisle, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary.
It's too bad, because there are plenty of opportunities to streamline government. Only the Republicans think streamlining is bad because it gives the new streamlined regulations more validity -- "we don't want better regulations, we want NO regulations". Democrats think streamlining is bad because simpler regulations can have larger loopholes -- "regulations should be intricately taylored to each situation so that big business can't slip anything (no matter how immaterial) through the loopholes."
As far as the MD trained in China... the problem with just letting foreign doctors practice here is that the quality of training varies dramatically overseas. The doctors in China who went to better universities and trained in better hospitals are probably on par with U.S. doctors. The ones who went to smaller, regional universities and trained in rural hospitals may not be qualified to practice in the U.S. A written exam wouldn't be able to distinguish, but maybe there's a middle-ground where a few U.S. institutions would be qualified to run 2-year residency programs where foreign doctors' skills are put to the test. The ones that pass get full MD privileges. The ones that don't get kicked down to medical school to start again.
See? There are possible compromises to these things. We really, really don't want a free-for-all in the healthcare system, though. It would be monetarily cheaper, but at what cost in lives?
You're missing the important assumption in that number: that the relationship between radiation levels and cancer is "linear, no threshold". While that assumption is widely used for analysis of low-dose radiation risk, it is known to be overly conservative. Studies in animals and studies of occupational exposure in humans tend to show a "non-linear, threshold" relationship. Below a certain threshold you get no measurable increase in cancer risk, above that threshold the risk increases non-linearly (I don't remember if it is exponential or polynomial).
Based on what we know about radiation risk, therefore, his 16 per billion number is most likely overstated.
Trees are unlikely to leave grooves in bone that would be mistaken for T.Rex teeth marks. In fact, being hit with a tree tends to break bones, not scrape long puncture marks. We're talking about vertebra with 3-5 inch long grooves, which are pretty much perfect matches for the shape and spacing of T.Rex teeth. In the case of intra-species fighting, these herbivores simply don't have teeth or horns which could match such grooves.
I guess it's possible there was another big predator out there at the time, but it would have to be about as tall as T.Rex, have similar-shaped teeth and have similar jaw strength in order to match the marks. So if it wasn't T.Rex, it would have to be something quite similar. If that were the case, then you'd have to be willing to conclude that T.Rex was a scavenger, but there was an unidentified therapod very similar to T.Rex that was a true predator. Why would that be any more convincing than just believing that this huge land-carnivore might have hunted live prey?
Asleep is not dead. If T.Rex was a scavenger-specialist, it would know the difference between a dead animal and a sleeping animal that might get up and fight back.
I thought T-Rex was downgraded from a hunter/killer to a carcass plundering carrion eater, like a buzzard.
There's still debate on this subject, but IMHO there's really too much evidence to the contrary to believe that T.Rex was a scavenger specialist (although pretty much all predators will eat carrion when available). The most interesting evidence are fossil bones of T.Rex prey that have partially-healed tooth marks that could only have been made by T.Rex. This is evidence of an animal that survived a T.Rex attack long enough for bone to partially heal (months/years). That would be hard if T.Rex were only a carrion specialist.
There was always a lot of skepticism of the scavenger hypothesis. Just looking at T.Rex would tend to create skepticism. T.Rex is big, muscular, has incredibly strong jaws, lots and lots of sharp piercing teeth... definitely was the scariest thing around at the time. The biggest, scariest meat eater in any ecosystem is rarely a scavenger specialist.
Another problem with the scavenger specialization idea is that T.Rex would have had pretty good binocular vision. Very useful for a predator. Scavengers don't need it so much.
We still don't have good evidence about T.Rex's hunting style, though. I think one of the reasons the scavenger specialist idea has been so intriguing is that people had a hard time figuring out how T.Rex could take down something like Triceratops, given it's pretty tough defenses. Also, there is some evidence that T.Rex would not have been a fast runner, so how did it chase down some of the prey that seems like it would have been fast runners?
When they find the partially-healed T.Rex bite marks I mentioned above, however, they tend to be on the prey's back. This would be pretty standard for a failed take-down, even among today's predators. Was it in fact a fast runner catching up from behind? If so, how did it take down Triceratops, which would probably turn and defend itself. Perhaps T.Rex was an ambush hunter, like today's Komodo Dragons, coming out of large brush and attacking from the side. Maybe T.Rex was a social hunter and surrounded its prey. I like to imagine T.Rex could leap over Triceratops horns, get behind it, get a grip on it's back, and shake it to death... But I have NO evidence for that, it's just fun to imagine.
EXACTLY. ARM's architecture may provide a slight advantage for low-power use compared to x86. But it's very, very slight. Certainly, Intel's advantage in process technology would outweigh ARM's advantage in architecture. The only real reason x86 hasn't competed with ARM so far in very-low-power is that no one has tried hard enough. There's finally enough demand for higher-end low-power chips that Intel is taking notice. I think Intel is also taking notice because they don't like seeing an ARM-based software ecosystem developing that could rival the x86-based software ecosystem. So it's as much a defensive play as a profit play.
This is one of those "I came on here to say this but you said it better" posts.
The only study they site about how much editing is done between submissions seems to indicate "not much at all".
Also, this could explain the prevalence of Nature and Science in the study. Risky papers may be rejected by the orthodoxy of more specialized journals. Nature and Science may avoid that kind of orthodoxy simply by having a broader array of reviewers than a more specialized journal might.
Pick a completely zany example in a field I know nothing about: You've done cutting edge work on the transport of lipids in palm fronds. There aren't that many people in the field, and most of them have been following a line of reasoning that lipids are transported by osmosis, as there has been some evidence of that. You have the hypothesis that lipids are transported by tiny aphids. You do some interesting lab work, that seems to support the hypothesis. The results are supportable, publishable, but not entirely definitive -- you know, statistically significant, but there's really a lot more work to be done before anyone can say you've really proven your hypothesis correct.
You submit your paper to a botany journal. They have it reviewed by a bunch of palm frond experts. All of them have studied palm fronds very closely. They mostly adhere to the unproven pet theory of osmosis. They do not consciously reject your paper because it contradicts their pet theory, but between the kinda shaky results, and their unconscious bias, it gets rejected.
Now you submit to Nature. They only have a couple palm frond experts in their stable, so they have a fern expert and a deciduous leaf expert review it. Neither the fern expert nor the deciduous expert have any unconscious bias. They think the whole thing seems pretty interesting, and worthy of broader discussion. So it gets approved. Now that the whole palm frond field has seen your work, a couple guys start trying to replicate your work, adding their own twists. They come up with supporting evidence and publish, with a reference to your work. A couple more guys come up with evidence that supports a different hypothesis. Even if you end up having been wrong at this point, your work gets referenced because it is what stimulated them to do their work. Let's say they discovered a third mechanism, that seems to explain transport even better. This third mechanism is unrelated to osmosis, so few of the osmosis studies are being referenced. But because your work stimulated the whole line of inquiry, your wrong study still gets lots of references.
(I added the part at the end about the work ending up being wrong just to illustrate that risky scientific invetigation doesn't have to end up being right in order to get referenced a lot. It just has to stimulate inquiry in a different direction such that people keep referencing the original study. A paper that just advances the field in an orthodox direction may still be great science, but may get lost in a sheaf of other similar studies advancing the field in that similar direction.)
Debates do not fall under that obligation. Debates are group interviews. A station can interview anyone they want. "Use" in that context generally relates to giving a candidate his own air time (whether paid or gratis) to do with as he/she pleases. So you cannot refuse to sell ad time to a candidate at the same rate as another candidate. You cannot give a candidate unmoderated air time (e.g. editorial speech at the end of a news segment) without giving the same air time to all candidates. But you are not required to provide the same amount of interview time (or any interview time) to all candidates.
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That doesn't make sense. Why would it matter if they could be sold or not? That economic value of treasuries is based on the assumption that the U.S. government pays its debts. The selling part just keeps you from having to wait until maturity.
I think confusion would be a very short-term problem. If they really did remove dollar bills from circulation, people would figure out the coins pretty quick. When they leave the bills in circulation and just circulate a few additional coins, then people are confused by the coins. They really just need to decide "do we want dollar coins or dollar bills?"
Personally, I really like the idea of dollar coins. I find the existence of coins in that price range for Euro and Pounds to be much more convenient than bills.
I think people would be more likely to let a few dollar coins sit around (in jars, drawers, etc.) than dollar bills. Only because bills are easier to carry around than coins. Sometimes you put all your coins somewhere out of convenience, and they sit there for longer than a bill would sit around. But this is a one-time thing. Any individual would tend to have a certain number of dollar coins sitting in a jar/drawer/etc. at any time. But it wouldn't grow over time.
In other words, right now I have no one-dollar-bills sitting in my dresser drawer. If we switched to coins, I wouldn't be surprised if at any time I didn't have 2-4 one-dollar-coins sitting in that drawer. So effectively, $2-4 dollars is out of circulation. But a year later, it's still the same $2-4. It didn't grow to $4-8.
The bonds in the SS trust fund have exactly the same economic value as the bonds that you hold in a money market.
The eBay/Intuit agreement (and the other similar agreements that were subject to a settlement a few years ago) were very broad in scope. It might be the breadth that is the issue.
I know, for instance, that it is legal for a company to agree not to solicit employees of another company for a defined period of time. This is often done as part of M&A transactions, where a company is buying a subsidiary of another company, and doesn't want the seller to just turn around and hire back key personnel. But those are limited in time. Also, the ones I've seen do not limit the ability to hire those people, only the ability to solicit them. So if the employee makes the first contact, all bets are off.
Another agreement I've seen often is as part of a M&A confidentiality agreement. Example: "You will provide us information about your company and access to key personnel in order to discuss a potential aquisition, in exchange, we agree not to solicit any of those employees for one year."
The eBay/Intuit agreement, however, is that they will not hire each others' employees for as long as the agreement remains in effect AND that it doesn't matter whether the employee approaches them first.
You also have to be careful when thinking about this due to the different conditions that could all be lumped into "vegetative states".
Someone with localized damage could appear vegetative, but really just be "locked in". In other words, they could have a largely intact brain, except for key regions blocking movement/communication. They would appear vegetative, but actually be able to react in ways that would show up in fMRI. This research could prove to be valid in such cases.
Someone like Teri Shiavo, though, is a whole different story. Her brain was so damaged that most of it was simply gone (damaged material is cleared out by the immune system). She mostly had a big empty cavity in her head filled with fluid. It's unlikely that fMRI would show any response in such a case. And even if it did, with that much damage it would be impossible to make any guess as to what that activity might mean.
The government in the U.S. solved a serious problem. But it doesn't get credit for solving the problem, because it only obeyed the will of the people. (So what? Didn't it still solve a 30-year old problem?) But in China government is not doing what the people want. So somehow that means all governments are bad.
You fail Logic 101.
Conversation over, since your ideology clearly trumps any attempt to make sense. Discourse under such conditions is simply not useful. Have fun living in your logic-free echo chamber.
There are A LOT of foreign medical schools. The only way to examine the curriculum is to go there and sit in on classes. And you couldn't wait until someone applied to move to the U.S. in order to do the review. Because what if they went to that school 10 years earlier? You'd have to know how good a medical school was 10 years ago. And what would you do about the fact that much of a doctor's practical medical training actually comes from internship and residency? For your proposal, the U.S. would have to have thousands of reviewers working around the world to determine the quality of medical education at med schools, internship programs and residency programs, just in case a decade later someone from one of those programs wanted to move to the U.S.
Isn't it easier to have some system to review the individual applicants?
1. Computer modeling points to T.Rex being slower than some of the animals we know it preyed on. Of course, the models could easily be wrong.
2. Chomp-and-wait against Triceratops only works if you're a stalker (T.Rex was too big for that) or an ambush predator (which was one of the options I suggested). You're probably not going to run down a Triceratops. It wouldn't run away. It would turn and defend itself. That's why I lean towards ambush predator. I just don't know enough about the vegetation to know if there was anywhere a T.Rex could really hide. Komodo Dragons get away with ambushing because there are bushes in its habitat big enough to hide in (and in spite of it's bulk, a Komodo is pretty low to the ground... easier to hide that way). I keep trying to figure out how T.Rex is gonna hide in some bushes. But if the bushes are big enough...
But another option against Triceratops is that T.Rex had some trick to avoiding those horns. That's why I suggested either social hunting or some kind of leaping move to get away from the horns. Even if it couldn't leap clear over Triceratops, maybe T.Rex could fake one direction, get Triceratops to commit, then quickly leap to the the other side, getting behind the crest and into position to bite Triceratops back. I'm just throwing ideas out at this point, though.
If you think drugs and medical devices aren't safer in the U.S. (and other developed countries with similar regulatory regimes) than in countries without FDA-like regimes, then you're just not paying attention.
But don't let facts get in the way of your ideology.
There are some problems that only government can fix. The market didn't stop GE from dumping PCBs in the Hudson river (which they'd been doing for 30 years), the government did. The market didn't stop Merck from selling Vioxx, the FDA did. Yes, Vioxx slipped through the FDA's system in the first place. That just means the system is not perfect. It doesn't mean we'd be better off without it.
Would VIA point me to the broad range of VIA-powered phones and tablets on the market?
Just because a regulatory regime does not result in a perfect outcome, doesn't mean it provides zero value to society. Not all approved drugs are perfectly safe. In fact, few drugs are perfectly safe. Tylenol is the only non-steroidal, non-opioid drug I can tolerate, for instance. For me, it's the safest option for treating pain (in suggested doses, Tylenol is less likely to create other problems than either steroid or opioid-based pain killers). Oxycontin has problems, but is still superior to many other opiate/opioid options.
As far as the illegal drugs, in my opinion there is room for legalizing some (if not all) of those. But isn't that a separate discussion topic from the costs/benefits of the FDA's regulatory regime in the healthcare market?
Besides, didn't these Triceratopses have soft underbellies and such? Seems to me that the neck and face bits would be the LAST to go, not the first.
I kind of agree with you here. It looks to me like all they showed was what the T.Rex does when it's time to go after the head/neck region. It does not necessarily show that it ate those parts first. However, I haven't seen the detailed study. It is possible that there is evidence that the head was first to be consumed. Maybe T.Rex sometimes abandoned the prey after eating the head/neck region. In such cases, T.Rex marks would only show up on the head/neck, while other scavengers' teeth would show up in the rest of the skeleton.
Or maybe there's other reason to believe they'd go for the head first. Maybe there's a lot of fat on the neck. Many large predators go for fat deposits first (calories), then organs (calories and micro-nutrients), then muscle (less-caloric macro-nutrients like protein).
I actually agree with your point. But the solution is not "no regulation". The solution is vigilance on the part of those who have influence over the regulatory bodies. To use another "TM", such vigilance is a Very Hard ThingTM, but is unfortunately the Only Reasonable SolutionTM. :-)
I object to the concept that if government just stopped regulating everything would be better. (Even Mitt Romney seems to agree with that point.)
But I also just as adamantly object to the concept that we can just throw in some more regulations and fix everything.
To give a completely unrelated example, there was plenty of regulatory authority in place for the government to have put a stop to the sometimes brain-dead and sometimes predatory lending practices that most people blame for the financial crisis. The U.S. did not need additional regulation after the financial crisis occurred. All the U.S. needed was for the regulators to exercise their authority against the most egregious of the mid-2000s lending practices. (May not have kept a recession from occurring, but would almost certainly have kept it from being the mess we have today.) Instead, what we have today are regulators that are just as timid about actually exercising judgement, but they now have a whole other layer of regulatory requirements they are responsible for. The worst of all worlds.
This is a good point. It's possible that many people with moderate hearing loss are overpaying for aids that are overkill for their condition. For people with more difficult to address conditions, though, the cheaper ones just don't cut it. My dad has severe tinitis, with associated hearing loss.* He tried hearing aids at all price levels. Only some very expensive ones worked well enough for him to even bother with (couple thousand dollars per ear, but I don't remember the exact price).
*Recent research into tinitis seems to lean towards the hypothesis that I worded that backwards. The old hypothesis was that the ringing sound makes it hard to hear in that range. The new hypothesis is that the ringing is a side-effect of losing hearing in that range -- i.e. it is the equivalent of phantom pain when a limb is severed.
And isn't that the whole problem with the structure of insurance? Consumers don't care about the cost because insurance picks it up anyway. "Sure, order that extra test", "don't give me generic, I want the name brand", etc. But the insurance company really passes the cost back right back to the consumers. So where's the part where someone says "that's too expensive, let's go with this other, cheaper, just-as-effective option". If the insurance company says it, then the customers complain about being screwed by a beaurocrat. But the customer really has little incentive to chose the just-as-good-but-cheaper option, because the extra cost doesn't directly affect his premium (it really gets spread out among all customers).
This is the point of the high-deductible insurance products: The high deductible means most day-to-day healthcare expenses entail expense to the consumer, so the consumer has incentive to keep these costs down. But the consumer is still insured in the case of larger expenses. But this still isn't a perfect outcome. In the perfect world, someone would develop a system of insurance that incentivizes the consumer, the doctor and the insurer to work together to find the optimum trade-offs between cost and outcome. None of the participants would have any incentive to spend any unnecessary money and none would have any incentive to fail to spend any necessary money. Hell if I know how to get to that, though.
Healthcare would be a hell of a lot cheaper if the government stayed the hell out of it.
It would also be much less effective and much less safe.
The free market doesn't fix everything. In fact, the basis of the current regulatory regime regarding new drugs was originally put in place because a bunch of consumers were killed by a bad drug... with especially painful-sounding deaths... the company never performed any testing with the formulation... and should have known there was a problem in the first place. The story is: Massengil used diethylene glycol as a solvent for dissolving sulfanilamide into an elixir format. Diethylene glycol was a known poison, but the company's chemist wasn't aware of that. Even very simple animal testing would have found the problem.
So how about instead of ridiculing every action the government takes, we all get together and try to limit the useless actions and focus government on the useful ones? Requiring drugs to be tested and shown to be safe and effective is a Good ThingTM. Whether in the U.S. or in countries with weaker regulatory regimes, we've seen time and time again that the free market is simply not up to the task of keeping ineffective or even dangerous drugs from being peddled to consumers. However, some of the detail of how the FDA reviews drugs might be amenable to streamlining (I don't know enough detail to suggest how, but it seems almost certainly probable).
On the other hand, your description of Ear Trumpet's experience with the FDA seems like a Bad ThingTM.
I'll bet if you got 10 Republican and 10 Democratic congressmen together (and could somehow figure out a way of making them ignore the fact they were working together), you could find 20 ways that everyone would agree would streamline the FDA without materially affecting the quality of health care. In decades past I would have said the biggest impediment to such agreements was that no one in Washington really cares to put such effort into low-profile results. That still might be a problem today, but the bigger problem in Washington today is the part I put in parenthesis above -- not only is there a divide that makes it hard to work together, congressmen are actively disincentivized from working across the aisle, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary.
It's too bad, because there are plenty of opportunities to streamline government. Only the Republicans think streamlining is bad because it gives the new streamlined regulations more validity -- "we don't want better regulations, we want NO regulations". Democrats think streamlining is bad because simpler regulations can have larger loopholes -- "regulations should be intricately taylored to each situation so that big business can't slip anything (no matter how immaterial) through the loopholes."
As far as the MD trained in China... the problem with just letting foreign doctors practice here is that the quality of training varies dramatically overseas. The doctors in China who went to better universities and trained in better hospitals are probably on par with U.S. doctors. The ones who went to smaller, regional universities and trained in rural hospitals may not be qualified to practice in the U.S. A written exam wouldn't be able to distinguish, but maybe there's a middle-ground where a few U.S. institutions would be qualified to run 2-year residency programs where foreign doctors' skills are put to the test. The ones that pass get full MD privileges. The ones that don't get kicked down to medical school to start again.
See? There are possible compromises to these things. We really, really don't want a free-for-all in the healthcare system, though. It would be monetarily cheaper, but at what cost in lives?
You're missing the important assumption in that number: that the relationship between radiation levels and cancer is "linear, no threshold". While that assumption is widely used for analysis of low-dose radiation risk, it is known to be overly conservative. Studies in animals and studies of occupational exposure in humans tend to show a "non-linear, threshold" relationship. Below a certain threshold you get no measurable increase in cancer risk, above that threshold the risk increases non-linearly (I don't remember if it is exponential or polynomial).
Based on what we know about radiation risk, therefore, his 16 per billion number is most likely overstated.
Trees are unlikely to leave grooves in bone that would be mistaken for T.Rex teeth marks. In fact, being hit with a tree tends to break bones, not scrape long puncture marks. We're talking about vertebra with 3-5 inch long grooves, which are pretty much perfect matches for the shape and spacing of T.Rex teeth. In the case of intra-species fighting, these herbivores simply don't have teeth or horns which could match such grooves.
I guess it's possible there was another big predator out there at the time, but it would have to be about as tall as T.Rex, have similar-shaped teeth and have similar jaw strength in order to match the marks. So if it wasn't T.Rex, it would have to be something quite similar. If that were the case, then you'd have to be willing to conclude that T.Rex was a scavenger, but there was an unidentified therapod very similar to T.Rex that was a true predator. Why would that be any more convincing than just believing that this huge land-carnivore might have hunted live prey?
Asleep is not dead. If T.Rex was a scavenger-specialist, it would know the difference between a dead animal and a sleeping animal that might get up and fight back.
I thought T-Rex was downgraded from a hunter/killer to a carcass plundering carrion eater, like a buzzard.
There's still debate on this subject, but IMHO there's really too much evidence to the contrary to believe that T.Rex was a scavenger specialist (although pretty much all predators will eat carrion when available). The most interesting evidence are fossil bones of T.Rex prey that have partially-healed tooth marks that could only have been made by T.Rex. This is evidence of an animal that survived a T.Rex attack long enough for bone to partially heal (months/years). That would be hard if T.Rex were only a carrion specialist.
There was always a lot of skepticism of the scavenger hypothesis. Just looking at T.Rex would tend to create skepticism. T.Rex is big, muscular, has incredibly strong jaws, lots and lots of sharp piercing teeth... definitely was the scariest thing around at the time. The biggest, scariest meat eater in any ecosystem is rarely a scavenger specialist.
Another problem with the scavenger specialization idea is that T.Rex would have had pretty good binocular vision. Very useful for a predator. Scavengers don't need it so much.
We still don't have good evidence about T.Rex's hunting style, though. I think one of the reasons the scavenger specialist idea has been so intriguing is that people had a hard time figuring out how T.Rex could take down something like Triceratops, given it's pretty tough defenses. Also, there is some evidence that T.Rex would not have been a fast runner, so how did it chase down some of the prey that seems like it would have been fast runners?
When they find the partially-healed T.Rex bite marks I mentioned above, however, they tend to be on the prey's back. This would be pretty standard for a failed take-down, even among today's predators. Was it in fact a fast runner catching up from behind? If so, how did it take down Triceratops, which would probably turn and defend itself. Perhaps T.Rex was an ambush hunter, like today's Komodo Dragons, coming out of large brush and attacking from the side. Maybe T.Rex was a social hunter and surrounded its prey. I like to imagine T.Rex could leap over Triceratops horns, get behind it, get a grip on it's back, and shake it to death... But I have NO evidence for that, it's just fun to imagine.
EXACTLY. ARM's architecture may provide a slight advantage for low-power use compared to x86. But it's very, very slight. Certainly, Intel's advantage in process technology would outweigh ARM's advantage in architecture. The only real reason x86 hasn't competed with ARM so far in very-low-power is that no one has tried hard enough. There's finally enough demand for higher-end low-power chips that Intel is taking notice. I think Intel is also taking notice because they don't like seeing an ARM-based software ecosystem developing that could rival the x86-based software ecosystem. So it's as much a defensive play as a profit play.
Then you should read up on Citizens United. Because that's not what it says.
This is one of those "I came on here to say this but you said it better" posts.
The only study they site about how much editing is done between submissions seems to indicate "not much at all".
Also, this could explain the prevalence of Nature and Science in the study. Risky papers may be rejected by the orthodoxy of more specialized journals. Nature and Science may avoid that kind of orthodoxy simply by having a broader array of reviewers than a more specialized journal might.
Pick a completely zany example in a field I know nothing about: You've done cutting edge work on the transport of lipids in palm fronds. There aren't that many people in the field, and most of them have been following a line of reasoning that lipids are transported by osmosis, as there has been some evidence of that. You have the hypothesis that lipids are transported by tiny aphids. You do some interesting lab work, that seems to support the hypothesis. The results are supportable, publishable, but not entirely definitive -- you know, statistically significant, but there's really a lot more work to be done before anyone can say you've really proven your hypothesis correct.
You submit your paper to a botany journal. They have it reviewed by a bunch of palm frond experts. All of them have studied palm fronds very closely. They mostly adhere to the unproven pet theory of osmosis. They do not consciously reject your paper because it contradicts their pet theory, but between the kinda shaky results, and their unconscious bias, it gets rejected.
Now you submit to Nature. They only have a couple palm frond experts in their stable, so they have a fern expert and a deciduous leaf expert review it. Neither the fern expert nor the deciduous expert have any unconscious bias. They think the whole thing seems pretty interesting, and worthy of broader discussion. So it gets approved. Now that the whole palm frond field has seen your work, a couple guys start trying to replicate your work, adding their own twists. They come up with supporting evidence and publish, with a reference to your work. A couple more guys come up with evidence that supports a different hypothesis. Even if you end up having been wrong at this point, your work gets referenced because it is what stimulated them to do their work. Let's say they discovered a third mechanism, that seems to explain transport even better. This third mechanism is unrelated to osmosis, so few of the osmosis studies are being referenced. But because your work stimulated the whole line of inquiry, your wrong study still gets lots of references.
(I added the part at the end about the work ending up being wrong just to illustrate that risky scientific invetigation doesn't have to end up being right in order to get referenced a lot. It just has to stimulate inquiry in a different direction such that people keep referencing the original study. A paper that just advances the field in an orthodox direction may still be great science, but may get lost in a sheaf of other similar studies advancing the field in that similar direction.)
Debates do not fall under that obligation. Debates are group interviews. A station can interview anyone they want. "Use" in that context generally relates to giving a candidate his own air time (whether paid or gratis) to do with as he/she pleases. So you cannot refuse to sell ad time to a candidate at the same rate as another candidate. You cannot give a candidate unmoderated air time (e.g. editorial speech at the end of a news segment) without giving the same air time to all candidates. But you are not required to provide the same amount of interview time (or any interview time) to all candidates.