Were you out sick from school when the immune system was taught?
Nothing (NOTHING) has a 100% infection rate on exposure, largely because your immune system fights off most of the crap that you are exposed to, often without you even noticing. Having a well functioning immune system will indeed improve your odds when you are exposed.
Vaccines work by boosting your immune system. They aren't a magic shield that turns away pathogens before they land on you; they help your immune system respond faster and stronger by teaching it, in advance, how to deal with a pathogen it hasn't seen previously. And they aren't 100% effective either. If they were, no one would give a shit if other people were vaccinated or not. If that last part isn't obvious to you, think about it for a minute or two.
So, in summary, vaccines are one thing, out of many, that help your immune system and reduce your chances of infection. If you assign liability, or worse, criminality, to not boosting your immune system in one way, why not the others too? Or why not to people that do things intentionally that reduce their immunity? (Keep in mind that there exists in the west a protected class of people, membership depending on choosing behavior that has astonishingly powerful negative effects on the immune system.)
1. EURO organizes a conference. 2. Knight, acting for EURO, books a hotel's conference facilities. 3. The facilities include a hospitality room, generally like a lounge. 4. Knight uses the hospitality room for other purposes, before the EURO conference starts. 5. One of those other things is a meeting for a neighborhood association. 6. Scalise spoke at that meeting, in the hospitality room.
Now make sure your tinfoil hat is on good and tight because the next step is a doozy:
7. Lamar White, Jr. asks three or four people if they've ever heard of the association in question, and they haven't. 8. Lamar White, Jr. assumes that any time a group of 3 or more people gather they must obtain government permission and get recorded on the state registry of corporations and DBAs, so he queries that database and finds nothing. 9. Lamar White, Jr. thus concludes that the whole thing was made up to hide Scalise's involvement.
Note also that step 6 involves "speaking at an event HOSTED by", but not "speaking TO a conference of".
He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.
He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)
Most people consider a person or group's values to be what their actions show, not what their words say.
There is a war waging inside the Republican party right now. There are two main branches, the conservative branch (think Reagan) and the Democrat-lite branch (think Bush family).
The conservatives are fighting to make small government one of the values of the Republican party again. As it is now, the best you can say about Republicans (as a whole) is that they favor government slightly smaller than the Democrats, but still not really "small".
The rules of good journalism clearly state that when the story is positive, no party affiliation mentioned means Republican. If the story is negative, no party affiliation means Democrat.
So, you may have guessed that "Justin Amash" is "Justin Amash (R-MI)"
I suspect that what you mean by "the common good" is your own personal preferences for how other people should live their lives.
If that is the case, then it is completely proper for people to disregard it, though contempt would be even more proper.
If you imagine it to be some universal preference, then I refer you back to my second reason why central decisions are not possible: there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. A refutation of this point requires proof of such a solution, and since this is a practical matter, you can't build it out of unobtanium and you can't crew it with angels.
Under all other sensible definitions of the words involved, "the common good" is exactly what capitalism produces as a side effect of masses of individuals (the common) improving their own lives (good).
Your last line reminds me of a mob protection scheme. The power hungry and their army of useful idiots cite their own sabotage as proof that free markets can't work and insist it is necessary to cede control of our lives to them. The proper response in both cases is a punch in the nose.
In case anyone was wondering, shooting is essentially an American hobby, so basically all ballistic information you'll find will be in feet per second and foot-pounds.
Regardless of your feelings about American units of measure, if you want to compare these numbers to the tables in reloading handbooks, to the numbers on a box of ammo, or to the advertisements in magazines, you'll need to convert one or the other. Makes much more sense to convert the numbers from the article to the system used by the largest shooting culture than to convert thousands of existing tables into SI.
Capitalism isn't about making or trading. It is about satisfying needs and wants. It is merely the distributed solution to that problem, while collectivism is the centralized "solution".
You may have noticed that solution was in quotes back there. That is because a centralized solution is not possible. First, there is no mechanism to accurately report wants and needs to a central authority. Second, there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. Third, the only way to enforce the central power's decisions is through violence, which around half of us reject.
The distributed solution, on the other hand, works pretty well, to whatever extent people want to implement it. The market is a tool for both finding and reporting on the relative worth and scarcity of things, which is to say, "the price". Also, the decisions are done at the local (individual) level, which is also the only place where a ranking of needs and wants is possible. Further, there is feedback. Those that do well at satisfying the needs and wants of others accumulate control over more resources. Those that do poorly lose their ability to mismanage things.
The reason that collectivism works in families and other tiny groups is because people can identify a small group as "us", and detect and punish cheaters through other social means. Somewhere around 50 to 75 people though, and the trust breaks down, hard.
No one but a reporter talks about bullets in miles per hour. 2000 MPH is about 3000 feet per second.
A typical handgun bullet (9mm, 45 ACP, etc) is going to be around 1000 to 1500 fps. Shoulder arms (223, 308, 30-06, etc) tend towards the 2500-3000 fps range.
The MJ/kg figures refer to Specific kinetic energy. To convert it to foot-pounds, you need to multiply it by the mass of the projectile to find the energy in joules, then multiply by 0.73756 (or do the dimensional analysis the hard way).
The grand jury is stacked against the defendant in several ways. First, there is no defense. Second, the standard is "probable cause" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt". Third, the grand jury only needs 9 votes to indict, while the trial needs 12 votes to convict. If the three quarters of the grand jury doesn't find, using very low standards, and without and defense opposition, that there was enough evidence to even warrant a trial (which would be done with very high standards, and an active defense team), then there was pretty much no chance that a trial would result in a conviction. This is really the whole point of the grand jury system. It is a high-pass filter, rejecting cases that are seriously lacking in merit.
In this case, the physical evidence has pretty well debunked the various execution fantasies. Even with a trial, we'd never have a perfectly accurate story of what happened, but we can be nearly certain that there was no murder, nor any manslaughter. All of the evidence and testimony will be public.
That's really all you have to do. There is no competition in most markets because competition is banned by government decree.
I live in a town with two cable companies. Actually, I live 5 miles out of town. Both cable companies have fiber optic networks here, both have great customer service, high speeds, low prices, etc.
The city I lived in previously had granted a monopoly to Charter. Charter has a coax network, lousy customer service, low speeds, high prices, etc.
Cable + DSL is not a meaningful competition, so having 2 monopolies is not the way to go. Stop granting cable monopolies and you will have competition.
P.S. Both companies have fully developed fiber networks in the ground (and on poles in some places) so don't try claiming that the monopoly is necessary for physical reasons. It isn't.
This isn't (just) about trying to dodge liability by having defined standards to meet.
The big retailers are all spending shitloads of money on security because they have to. Now they want regulations that require everyone else to do the same.
A few million each year for security compliance is nothing to Target or Walmart. It is a dagger in the heart of their local and regional competition.
If you park in a ramp, the back of the ticket says that the ramp's owners/management disclaim responsibility for damage to the cars.
That means that you shouldn't complain to them if the guy that parks next to you dings your car with his door. It doesn't mean that the employees expect that they have permission to walk down a row of cars smashing out headlights with a hammer.
So, what you are saying is that you are unaware of the mountain of research into this field, and prefer to rely on something you heard from someone who was equally uninformed, but which sounded "right" to you?
Intelligence is wildly complex, and even the one part of it that we measure as IQ is beyond our current comprehension, so I wouldn't bet much money on the results of selecting for it genetically, based on our current knowledge of the subject. But if you think that IQ is "dubious", you are telling us about your biases, nothing more.
Don't be too hard on him. I read the same story a while back. It may have even been linked up here on/., but I don't remember exactly.
I spent a couple of seconds looking for it too, but can't find it. Doesn't matter though, it was from a soft "science" that places no value in reproducing results, has no tradition of introspection, and a tendency to stretch results (occasionally real, but usually statistical artifact) into sensational claims. And just imagine how much worse it gets when the press gets involved...
Usually these are done by picking a "proxy" for X, a "proxy" for Y, torturing the data until it provides a small p value, and then claiming that X causes Y. Note that you can't reliably determine an infant's political views, so a proxy for Republican-ness is necessary unless you are willing to wait a couple of decades after measuring the thing that you are going to pass off as "fear".
I've got $100 in my wallet right now, and I'm sitting on it. I don't use cash much, so it's been there for ages. But it has not grown and never will. (Though if we had honest money, natural deflation would make things cheaper, which is sorta like growing, but not the same.)
If I want it to grow, I have to take a risk with it. I need to give it to someone else, in return for a promise that they will return it and more. Or I need to spend it myself on something that I think will be a productive asset.
(I'm not making an argument for/against consumption or capital taxes here. I'm just pointing out a gross error in your post and/or thinking.)
I moved a while back and have fiber now. The ONT is powered by a special UPS, using some unusual power connector. So, I didn't set up the relay box.
But the scripts still run, they still harvest IPs and monitor them. Fortunately, it hasn't needed a reset yet. My few problems have been at the head end: their DHCP server died once, and they had routing problems one other time.
Old cable modems sucked. Mine would often lock up, needing a power cycle to resume working. Very annoying when I was at work.
The quick and easy solution is to monitor the connection status and flip a relay to reboot the modem. But how to monitor the connection? Setting a single host or IP seemed like a bad idea because it would have added an extra, and totally unnecessary, single point of failure.
Instead, my home router (slackware box with 2 ethernet cards) collects the IPs that I connect to (by watching the conntrack stuff in/proc/ ), and if it can ping them, adds them to the ping list. It then pings random selections from that list to verify connectivity. IPs are removed if they are unreachable for a while (until it decides the connection is down; no point purging the whole list because of an outage).
Took me a couple of hours to set up and debug, back in like 2002 or 2005 or whenever I wrote it. I presume that there is some free software to do the same task by now.
Monitoring a single fixed hostname is foolish, at best. And this is like the 3rd or 4th big story (that I can think of) about home routers acting badly because of hardcoded values.
Obama already tried that. His decision to pull out without leaving a residual force is why we now have ISIS on the news today.
Are you suggesting that we should invade again, so that we can flee a second time? Or do you think we should pull out-er than we've already pulled out?
P.S. There were no false pretenses and at one point we had won and accomplished something close to political stability. Obama really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. I don't know what to make of your other claims.
Central planning does not work, in general. See Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" if you are wondering how and why.
Which isn't to say that central planning can never work. A rail network is a large enough project that it more or less must be planned. The question there is who does the planning and who pays for it.
Under capitalism, the people planning it are the ones providing the funding. If they plan it poorly, they lose money, and thus have less ability to make poor decisions in the future. If they plan it well, they profit, and thus have more ability to make good decisions in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Were you out sick from school when the immune system was taught?
Nothing (NOTHING) has a 100% infection rate on exposure, largely because your immune system fights off most of the crap that you are exposed to, often without you even noticing. Having a well functioning immune system will indeed improve your odds when you are exposed.
Vaccines work by boosting your immune system. They aren't a magic shield that turns away pathogens before they land on you; they help your immune system respond faster and stronger by teaching it, in advance, how to deal with a pathogen it hasn't seen previously. And they aren't 100% effective either. If they were, no one would give a shit if other people were vaccinated or not. If that last part isn't obvious to you, think about it for a minute or two.
So, in summary, vaccines are one thing, out of many, that help your immune system and reduce your chances of infection. If you assign liability, or worse, criminality, to not boosting your immune system in one way, why not the others too? Or why not to people that do things intentionally that reduce their immunity? (Keep in mind that there exists in the west a protected class of people, membership depending on choosing behavior that has astonishingly powerful negative effects on the immune system.)
For those with weak reading comprehension:
1. EURO organizes a conference.
2. Knight, acting for EURO, books a hotel's conference facilities.
3. The facilities include a hospitality room, generally like a lounge.
4. Knight uses the hospitality room for other purposes, before the EURO conference starts.
5. One of those other things is a meeting for a neighborhood association.
6. Scalise spoke at that meeting, in the hospitality room.
Now make sure your tinfoil hat is on good and tight because the next step is a doozy:
7. Lamar White, Jr. asks three or four people if they've ever heard of the association in question, and they haven't.
8. Lamar White, Jr. assumes that any time a group of 3 or more people gather they must obtain government permission and get recorded on the state registry of corporations and DBAs, so he queries that database and finds nothing.
9. Lamar White, Jr. thus concludes that the whole thing was made up to hide Scalise's involvement.
Note also that step 6 involves "speaking at an event HOSTED by", but not "speaking TO a conference of".
http://dailyanarchist.com/2012...
http://www.cpsc.gov/en/Newsroo...
He was charged for selling agricultural fireworks (to scare away pests) on ebay. Turns out that the manufacturer was making them too powerful and/or not following regulations that limit their sale to farmers, ranchers, and growers.
He was also the only person prosecuted over the incident, despite the same fireworks being sold all over, including Cabelas. (Ken Shearer is mentioned in the CPSC press release, but his case is unrelated.)
It must be rough for those that rejected Stallman as "too extreme", catching up to where he was in the 80s.
This is the "No true Scottsman" fallacy.
Most people consider a person or group's values to be what their actions show, not what their words say.
There is a war waging inside the Republican party right now. There are two main branches, the conservative branch (think Reagan) and the Democrat-lite branch (think Bush family).
The conservatives are fighting to make small government one of the values of the Republican party again. As it is now, the best you can say about Republicans (as a whole) is that they favor government slightly smaller than the Democrats, but still not really "small".
You aren't looking forward to seeing Rick Deckard and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls?
The rules of good journalism clearly state that when the story is positive, no party affiliation mentioned means Republican. If the story is negative, no party affiliation means Democrat.
So, you may have guessed that "Justin Amash" is "Justin Amash (R-MI)"
I suspect that what you mean by "the common good" is your own personal preferences for how other people should live their lives.
If that is the case, then it is completely proper for people to disregard it, though contempt would be even more proper.
If you imagine it to be some universal preference, then I refer you back to my second reason why central decisions are not possible: there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. A refutation of this point requires proof of such a solution, and since this is a practical matter, you can't build it out of unobtanium and you can't crew it with angels.
Under all other sensible definitions of the words involved, "the common good" is exactly what capitalism produces as a side effect of masses of individuals (the common) improving their own lives (good).
Your last line reminds me of a mob protection scheme. The power hungry and their army of useful idiots cite their own sabotage as proof that free markets can't work and insist it is necessary to cede control of our lives to them. The proper response in both cases is a punch in the nose.
In case anyone was wondering, shooting is essentially an American hobby, so basically all ballistic information you'll find will be in feet per second and foot-pounds.
Regardless of your feelings about American units of measure, if you want to compare these numbers to the tables in reloading handbooks, to the numbers on a box of ammo, or to the advertisements in magazines, you'll need to convert one or the other. Makes much more sense to convert the numbers from the article to the system used by the largest shooting culture than to convert thousands of existing tables into SI.
Who modded up this middle school crap?
Capitalism isn't about making or trading. It is about satisfying needs and wants. It is merely the distributed solution to that problem, while collectivism is the centralized "solution".
You may have noticed that solution was in quotes back there. That is because a centralized solution is not possible. First, there is no mechanism to accurately report wants and needs to a central authority. Second, there is no general solution for ranking or ordering those wants and needs. Third, the only way to enforce the central power's decisions is through violence, which around half of us reject.
The distributed solution, on the other hand, works pretty well, to whatever extent people want to implement it. The market is a tool for both finding and reporting on the relative worth and scarcity of things, which is to say, "the price". Also, the decisions are done at the local (individual) level, which is also the only place where a ranking of needs and wants is possible. Further, there is feedback. Those that do well at satisfying the needs and wants of others accumulate control over more resources. Those that do poorly lose their ability to mismanage things.
The reason that collectivism works in families and other tiny groups is because people can identify a small group as "us", and detect and punish cheaters through other social means. Somewhere around 50 to 75 people though, and the trust breaks down, hard.
No one but a reporter talks about bullets in miles per hour. 2000 MPH is about 3000 feet per second.
A typical handgun bullet (9mm, 45 ACP, etc) is going to be around 1000 to 1500 fps. Shoulder arms (223, 308, 30-06, etc) tend towards the 2500-3000 fps range.
The MJ/kg figures refer to Specific kinetic energy. To convert it to foot-pounds, you need to multiply it by the mass of the projectile to find the energy in joules, then multiply by 0.73756 (or do the dimensional analysis the hard way).
A trial would have been a waste of time.
The grand jury is stacked against the defendant in several ways. First, there is no defense. Second, the standard is "probable cause" instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt". Third, the grand jury only needs 9 votes to indict, while the trial needs 12 votes to convict. If the three quarters of the grand jury doesn't find, using very low standards, and without and defense opposition, that there was enough evidence to even warrant a trial (which would be done with very high standards, and an active defense team), then there was pretty much no chance that a trial would result in a conviction. This is really the whole point of the grand jury system. It is a high-pass filter, rejecting cases that are seriously lacking in merit.
In this case, the physical evidence has pretty well debunked the various execution fantasies. Even with a trial, we'd never have a perfectly accurate story of what happened, but we can be nearly certain that there was no murder, nor any manslaughter. All of the evidence and testimony will be public.
STOP GIVING OUT CABLE MONOPOLIES.
That's really all you have to do. There is no competition in most markets because competition is banned by government decree.
I live in a town with two cable companies. Actually, I live 5 miles out of town. Both cable companies have fiber optic networks here, both have great customer service, high speeds, low prices, etc.
The city I lived in previously had granted a monopoly to Charter. Charter has a coax network, lousy customer service, low speeds, high prices, etc.
Cable + DSL is not a meaningful competition, so having 2 monopolies is not the way to go. Stop granting cable monopolies and you will have competition.
P.S. Both companies have fully developed fiber networks in the ground (and on poles in some places) so don't try claiming that the monopoly is necessary for physical reasons. It isn't.
Typically, the mail server won't even advertise the AUTH command until after the connection is encrypted.
If your mail client is sending unadvertised commands, you should probably file a bug report.
This isn't (just) about trying to dodge liability by having defined standards to meet.
The big retailers are all spending shitloads of money on security because they have to. Now they want regulations that require everyone else to do the same.
A few million each year for security compliance is nothing to Target or Walmart. It is a dagger in the heart of their local and regional competition.
No, it almost never happens in science. That error is typically a symptom of pseudoscience.
If you park in a ramp, the back of the ticket says that the ramp's owners/management disclaim responsibility for damage to the cars.
That means that you shouldn't complain to them if the guy that parks next to you dings your car with his door. It doesn't mean that the employees expect that they have permission to walk down a row of cars smashing out headlights with a hammer.
So, what you are saying is that you are unaware of the mountain of research into this field, and prefer to rely on something you heard from someone who was equally uninformed, but which sounded "right" to you?
Intelligence is wildly complex, and even the one part of it that we measure as IQ is beyond our current comprehension, so I wouldn't bet much money on the results of selecting for it genetically, based on our current knowledge of the subject. But if you think that IQ is "dubious", you are telling us about your biases, nothing more.
Don't be too hard on him. I read the same story a while back. It may have even been linked up here on /., but I don't remember exactly.
I spent a couple of seconds looking for it too, but can't find it. Doesn't matter though, it was from a soft "science" that places no value in reproducing results, has no tradition of introspection, and a tendency to stretch results (occasionally real, but usually statistical artifact) into sensational claims. And just imagine how much worse it gets when the press gets involved...
Usually these are done by picking a "proxy" for X, a "proxy" for Y, torturing the data until it provides a small p value, and then claiming that X causes Y. Note that you can't reliably determine an infant's political views, so a proxy for Republican-ness is necessary unless you are willing to wait a couple of decades after measuring the thing that you are going to pass off as "fear".
"sit on their money and let it grow" ? Really?
I've got $100 in my wallet right now, and I'm sitting on it. I don't use cash much, so it's been there for ages. But it has not grown and never will. (Though if we had honest money, natural deflation would make things cheaper, which is sorta like growing, but not the same.)
If I want it to grow, I have to take a risk with it. I need to give it to someone else, in return for a promise that they will return it and more. Or I need to spend it myself on something that I think will be a productive asset.
(I'm not making an argument for/against consumption or capital taxes here. I'm just pointing out a gross error in your post and/or thinking.)
You are doing it wrong. Slackware isn't for gurus, it makes them.
Mostly.
I moved a while back and have fiber now. The ONT is powered by a special UPS, using some unusual power connector. So, I didn't set up the relay box.
But the scripts still run, they still harvest IPs and monitor them. Fortunately, it hasn't needed a reset yet. My few problems have been at the head end: their DHCP server died once, and they had routing problems one other time.
Old cable modems sucked. Mine would often lock up, needing a power cycle to resume working. Very annoying when I was at work.
The quick and easy solution is to monitor the connection status and flip a relay to reboot the modem. But how to monitor the connection? Setting a single host or IP seemed like a bad idea because it would have added an extra, and totally unnecessary, single point of failure.
Instead, my home router (slackware box with 2 ethernet cards) collects the IPs that I connect to (by watching the conntrack stuff in /proc/ ), and if it can ping them, adds them to the ping list. It then pings random selections from that list to verify connectivity. IPs are removed if they are unreachable for a while (until it decides the connection is down; no point purging the whole list because of an outage).
Took me a couple of hours to set up and debug, back in like 2002 or 2005 or whenever I wrote it. I presume that there is some free software to do the same task by now.
Monitoring a single fixed hostname is foolish, at best. And this is like the 3rd or 4th big story (that I can think of) about home routers acting badly because of hardcoded values.
Obama already tried that. His decision to pull out without leaving a residual force is why we now have ISIS on the news today.
Are you suggesting that we should invade again, so that we can flee a second time? Or do you think we should pull out-er than we've already pulled out?
P.S. There were no false pretenses and at one point we had won and accomplished something close to political stability. Obama really snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here. I don't know what to make of your other claims.
Central planning does not work, in general. See Hayek's "The Fatal Conceit" if you are wondering how and why.
Which isn't to say that central planning can never work. A rail network is a large enough project that it more or less must be planned. The question there is who does the planning and who pays for it.
Under capitalism, the people planning it are the ones providing the funding. If they plan it poorly, they lose money, and thus have less ability to make poor decisions in the future. If they plan it well, they profit, and thus have more ability to make good decisions in the future.