Please take your pills again, otherwise you'll write more nonsense.
If you grow up in Germany, you will get fed everything about the holocaust until you are sick of it. It will be the topic of (mandatory) history class for at least half a year, usually one year.
There's stuff on TV about the holocaust every week. There's lots of books in the history section of book stores.
The jewish lobby organisations have a massive influence, and if you want to kill a political topic dead, all you need to do is find a convincing way to link it to the holocaust. For example, there's a current discussion regarding the legality of circumcision for religious purposes. We're not talking about something done by a doctor in a hospital under anesthesia, but about the religious ceremony where some priest cuts of a part of your dick as a child without any painkillers. A court recently ruled that strictly speaking, that is assault. There was an uproar within Germany because both muslims and jews do that to their kids. In the media, the jewish position takes headlines, while the muslim position is rarely mentioned. There are about 200,000 jews in Germany, but 3.6 million muslims. Jewish speakers seriously said that this court decision "is the worst thing that happened to judaism in Germany since the holocaust".
Israel is more likely to forget about the holocaust than Germany is.
Their bluff would be called, and the amount of credibility it costs them would be considerable. Basically, it would be the last time ever they threaten anything and someone believes them.
Any CEO who pulled such a stunt would be kicked out and sued into oblivion before the ink is dry. Europe is bigger than the US, you don't pull out of there unless you have a business suicide wish.
Just like in the US, you can be sued for pretty much anything by pretty much anyone.
Whether or not that case would've been laughed out of court or not - well your friend didn't want to find out, which I can understand. But there's nothing Germany-specific there.
People who take homeopathic treatments are (statistically) better off than those who remain untreated. You seem to agree with that statement, but are so anti-homeopathy that you can't accept that statement without disagreeing with yourself.
No, I disagree with your insistence to include something that is entirely superfluous. You could just as well say that people who take blue sugar pills are statistically better off than those who don't. That doesn't mean that "blue" has any meaning.
And because it has been demonstrated time and time again to have no medicinal effect whatsoever, I refuse to accept the term "homeopathic treatment", as it makes it sound as if homeopathy would actually treat anything.
I could spit into the bottle, call it "Tomopathic" and claim that "people who take Tomopathic treatments are (statistically) better off than those who remain untreated". Would you agree with that? Would you pay me a bucketload of money so Tomopathic treatments get included in your nation's health program?
And yes, I am very anti on this point because I fail to see why you insist on winning this argument, other than getting a backdoor argument pro homeopathy out of it. Maybe this is not justified in your personal case, but this is the standard procedure of the scammers behind all this bullshit, be it homeopathy, astrology or any number of scams: They get their opponents to agree to some watered-down statement and then take it out of context, claiming that this supports their point.
A placebo will (statistically) create a placebo effect, no matter if it is based on voodoo, homeopathy, spitting into the bottle or nothing at all. That does not mean we should be paying money to people to spit into bottles, nor any of the other scams. There is no such thing as homeopathic medicine, and you can get the placebo effect for a fraction of the cost, with much less overhead, lying and making frauds rich.
True about Ghostery, etc. - but we are the geeks, we are winning this fight. In the end, as long as I control the browser, I can find a way to kill your advertisement.
On the downside, this is why product placement, etc. are becoming so pervasive.
I read up on ABL, didn't know about it, thanks. Then I read http://adblockplus.org/de/acceptable-ads - and while I'm not a fan, I understand where they're coming from. I've unchecked that setting for me, and if they leave it alone on updates, I'm ok. It just might have at least the effect of teaching the ad guys to not be obnoxious.
So you are agreeing with me in a disagreeable manner. The placebo effect is there. When an ineffective treatment is given, the results are almost always better than no treatment at all. Thus, you are arguing that homeopathy, if ineffective, is effective due to the placebo effect and the low cost of water.
We are talking about different things.
You are talking about treatment, I am talking about statistics.
Also, I reject the wording that something can be ineffective and effective at the same time. Homeopathy is entirely ineffective, period. That is what is being measured if you measure compared to a placebo. There is no such thing as a homeopathic "effect due to the placebo" - that's like saying that drinking water helps you survive cancer, because if you don't drink water you die. Yes, technically speaking it is true, but the causation is false. You die if you don't drink water, whether you have cancer or not. And giving someone a funny pill will have a measurable effect whether there is homeopathy involved or not. Giving homeopathy some credibility by saying it is effective "via the placebo effect" is hogwash.
And in the context of a national health plan, it should improve the general health of all to endorse placebos. There are statistical effects as you describe when the placebos are distributed to millions of people.
That has so many layers, it is hard to get to the core of it. No, wait it isn't. The answer is: Homeopathy is a scam, period. No amount of beating around the bush changes that.
If you want to administer placebos to the population, don't call it homeopathy. There is one ethical and one business reason for that. The ethical reason is that it is not ok to lie like that. The business reason is that homeopathy is expensive and tap water is cheap. If you call it homeopathy, you will support all the scammers making expensive tap-water.
Two, while there are statistical effects, you are a crazy criminal if you use homeopathy to actually treat an individual patient with anything serious. The placebo effect is not individually reliable, and if your patient is unconscious, the effect is null. If there's a life or permanent damage on the line, you damn better have something that has an actual effect.
You can not apply statistics as solutions to individual cases. Statistically speaking, we are all 51% female and 49% male. You probably don't know many individuals who actually are like that.
The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."
Joining the catholic church also helps a lot. Let's not ignore in all this hysteria that the vast majority of child abuse does not originate with strangers looking for more material for their kiddie porn collection. Most culprits are known to the victim and often very close. Family members are the largest group, priests and other persons of implicit trust the second largest.
Legalized possession of images of child abuse allows a market for such things to grow larger that it would be otherwise, creating a demand for more child abuse. There could still be laws against profiting from child abuse, but the drug market has proved that where there is money to be made there will be supply.
Which idiots modded you "insightful" ?
Markets, by definition, have two orthogonal axes - demand and supply. You believe that more supply will create more demand, but very few markets work that way. What generally happens is that prices drop.
People don't eat more bread just because you bake more of it. Hollywood can produce twice as many movies and I'm quite sure that movie sales would not change all that much in total. The amount of music sold does not seem to depend on the number of bands that make it.
What the drug market proves is that making something illegal does not wipe out demand. So how do you come to the conclusion that the opposite works?
With all sympathies - you can write about it on/. with your user account (that at least some people can link to you, I'm sure) and yet you can't report it?
Also a high percentage of people charged with child pornography crimes are also found to have sexual abused a child at some point.
[citation required]
When it comes to porn, I am quite certain that consumers and producers are two fairly distinct groups. I don't see why child porn should be the opposite. I can be convinced by facts, so please show them. And anecdotal evidence does not support a claim that begins with "a high percentag of..." - to make such a claim, you need a representative sample size.
And people who would pleasure themselves to it are pedophiles!
Being a pedophile is not illegal. Harming kids is. There is a difference between the two. If we had thought crimes, I would be in jail for murder a dozen times over, every time some drunken asshole wakes up half the street in the middle of the night.
It sure sucked what happened to you, but in the case of child porn laws, there are victims on all sides, and some of them can be avoided by more reasonable laws. You do know that the burden of proof is on you? I could upload that video showing yourself to your computer and you would be jailed for possession of child pornography. Unless you can prove that you didn't put it there yourself. Oh yes, and you'd be registered as a sex criminal for the rest of your life, not allowed to live near a school or many other places, everyone would look at you funny, and you would definitely not enjoy explaining to them how that came about. Maybe that thought experiment helps you understand the other side that wants to not protect kiddie fuckers, but those caught innocently in the drag nets. Yes, they exist. I've been online long enough, I've had people come to me asking for help who had used the Internet to get some cheap porn and there was kiddie porn mixed in. I've run across enough links to what I was sure was kiddie porn. Heck, if that had been recently, with all the pre-fetching of modern browsers, I would've probably been in posession of something.
Why do they test against placebos, rather than no treatment? Because placebos are more effective than no treatment. Placebos are better than nothing, and a whole lot cheaper than regular treatment.
No, that is not the reason.
They test against placebos because every actual drug also has the placebo effect. If you would test against nothing, you would - due to the placebo effect - almost always find that your "medicine" is effective, even if it is actually counter-productive. In many cases, you would have to administer a poison to get a null result.
That does not mean that placebos are an effective treatment. Note that it's still called the placebo effect and not the "placebo treatment" or the "placebo cure" or the "placebo medicine".
That's because placebo effects are a) unstable and b) context-sensitive. Changing the experiment from a double-blind to a simple blind test, for example, often dramatically reduces the placebo effect. Giving a placebo to an unconscious patient in emergency care will have no effect.
That's why placebos are not used as medicine in regular treatment. They are not reliable. The placebo effect is a statistical effect, measured over large samples. You can not count on it in an individual case.
Yes, of course. Or at least I am not aware of any real medically qualified people testing homeopathic bullshit on patients with real issues.
Homeopaths, of course, do it all the time. A couple of them have ended up in the news with their failures, some (too few if you ask me) have ended up in jail.
Easily identifyable physical objects? Yeah, sure. Please rob a bank or something, you're going to be the easiest catch since the guy who wrote the "hand me all your money" note on the back of his business card.
The best non-funny reply is actually something I heard maybe 10 years ago, allegedly a lesson a mother gave to her kid regarding TV: "Nothing on TV is real, including the news."
So, in a country as big as the U.S., with cities as large as ours, and as far-flung, where freedom of movement is important to our everyday lives, driving is suddenly a "choice"??
I'm done with this non-argument. You are ignoring my points, repeating yours with no additional supporting evidence and now you're trying a weak strawman.
They had one chance to convince us that they aren't evil, greedy bastards and meet us in the middle, with us accepting reasonable ads that don't mess with us in ways we don't like.
They fucked it up.
So I'll feel even more justified in recommending Adblock Plus to absolutely everyone whose browser window I ever see.
You didn't want to compromise, assholes, so for all I care, you can all go broke.
No, it isn't. That sign communicates a statement with a measurable truth value - either there is or there isn't actually a baby in the car, so you are either saying the truth or you are lying.
The DNT flag expresses a preference. The only person to judge its truth value is you. Basically, the car analogy equivalent would be a sticker saying "please don't drive too close".
Now continue your thought experiment regarding what would happen if everyone put that sticker on their car.
Along the same lines is the stance adopted by Digital Advertising Alliance. The alliance has revealed that it will only honor DNT if and only if it is not switched on by default.
This is why we need laws and regulations. This was obvious the minute DNT was announced. I think I posted a few comments back then. Of course they will find excuses to not honour it. If it weren't this one, it would be something different.
In an ideal world, they would be fined $1000 for every single time they ignore the flag, that would put them out of business within a week.
Of course, in the real world we live in, such ridiculous fines are reserved for unemployed mothers downloading a few music tracks for their kids.
And they are completely right. If you attend a university that does accept WP as a source, quit immediately and move to somewhere where your degree will actually be worth something.
Porn stars, politicians, celebrities (B, C and further down) - basically anyone whose primary asset is fame will have a WP page, while most people whose primary asset is some actually meaningful contribution to mankind will not.
No, someone banks on them being really untraceable. I'm quite certain they plan to exchange them back to US$ fairly quickly. Meanwhile, bitcoins make a good storage.
The problem with that is ethical. Since there is no evidence that homeopathy works testing it on sick people would not survive any ethical review if it interfered with real treatment.
The real world doesn't work like that. Drugs, including placebo controls, are testing in double-blind tests on real patients with real issues, up to and including heart attacks.
Source: My ex studied this stuff. Yeah, she was a bit shocked at first, too.
I'm no fan of magic and witchcraft. I know it was something other than earache but those pills worked.
I don't mind utilizing the placebo effect.
What I do mind is that the NHS could've paid 1/100th for the same thing by simply setting up its own sugar pill factory and labelling the product with whatever strikes their fancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Germany not wanting to remember the holocaust
Please take your pills again, otherwise you'll write more nonsense.
If you grow up in Germany, you will get fed everything about the holocaust until you are sick of it. It will be the topic of (mandatory) history class for at least half a year, usually one year.
There's stuff on TV about the holocaust every week. There's lots of books in the history section of book stores.
The jewish lobby organisations have a massive influence, and if you want to kill a political topic dead, all you need to do is find a convincing way to link it to the holocaust. For example, there's a current discussion regarding the legality of circumcision for religious purposes. We're not talking about something done by a doctor in a hospital under anesthesia, but about the religious ceremony where some priest cuts of a part of your dick as a child without any painkillers. A court recently ruled that strictly speaking, that is assault. There was an uproar within Germany because both muslims and jews do that to their kids. In the media, the jewish position takes headlines, while the muslim position is rarely mentioned. There are about 200,000 jews in Germany, but 3.6 million muslims. Jewish speakers seriously said that this court decision "is the worst thing that happened to judaism in Germany since the holocaust".
Israel is more likely to forget about the holocaust than Germany is.
Their bluff would be called, and the amount of credibility it costs them would be considerable. Basically, it would be the last time ever they threaten anything and someone believes them.
*sigh*
It's getting old.
Any CEO who pulled such a stunt would be kicked out and sued into oblivion before the ink is dry. Europe is bigger than the US, you don't pull out of there unless you have a business suicide wish.
Just like in the US, you can be sued for pretty much anything by pretty much anyone.
Whether or not that case would've been laughed out of court or not - well your friend didn't want to find out, which I can understand. But there's nothing Germany-specific there.
People who take homeopathic treatments are (statistically) better off than those who remain untreated. You seem to agree with that statement, but are so anti-homeopathy that you can't accept that statement without disagreeing with yourself.
No, I disagree with your insistence to include something that is entirely superfluous. You could just as well say that people who take blue sugar pills are statistically better off than those who don't. That doesn't mean that "blue" has any meaning.
And because it has been demonstrated time and time again to have no medicinal effect whatsoever, I refuse to accept the term "homeopathic treatment", as it makes it sound as if homeopathy would actually treat anything.
I could spit into the bottle, call it "Tomopathic" and claim that "people who take Tomopathic treatments are (statistically) better off than those who remain untreated". Would you agree with that? Would you pay me a bucketload of money so Tomopathic treatments get included in your nation's health program?
And yes, I am very anti on this point because I fail to see why you insist on winning this argument, other than getting a backdoor argument pro homeopathy out of it. Maybe this is not justified in your personal case, but this is the standard procedure of the scammers behind all this bullshit, be it homeopathy, astrology or any number of scams: They get their opponents to agree to some watered-down statement and then take it out of context, claiming that this supports their point.
A placebo will (statistically) create a placebo effect, no matter if it is based on voodoo, homeopathy, spitting into the bottle or nothing at all. That does not mean we should be paying money to people to spit into bottles, nor any of the other scams. There is no such thing as homeopathic medicine, and you can get the placebo effect for a fraction of the cost, with much less overhead, lying and making frauds rich.
True about Ghostery, etc. - but we are the geeks, we are winning this fight. In the end, as long as I control the browser, I can find a way to kill your advertisement.
On the downside, this is why product placement, etc. are becoming so pervasive.
I read up on ABL, didn't know about it, thanks. Then I read http://adblockplus.org/de/acceptable-ads - and while I'm not a fan, I understand where they're coming from. I've unchecked that setting for me, and if they leave it alone on updates, I'm ok. It just might have at least the effect of teaching the ad guys to not be obnoxious.
So you are agreeing with me in a disagreeable manner. The placebo effect is there. When an ineffective treatment is given, the results are almost always better than no treatment at all. Thus, you are arguing that homeopathy, if ineffective, is effective due to the placebo effect and the low cost of water.
We are talking about different things.
You are talking about treatment, I am talking about statistics.
Also, I reject the wording that something can be ineffective and effective at the same time. Homeopathy is entirely ineffective, period. That is what is being measured if you measure compared to a placebo. There is no such thing as a homeopathic "effect due to the placebo" - that's like saying that drinking water helps you survive cancer, because if you don't drink water you die. Yes, technically speaking it is true, but the causation is false. You die if you don't drink water, whether you have cancer or not. And giving someone a funny pill will have a measurable effect whether there is homeopathy involved or not. Giving homeopathy some credibility by saying it is effective "via the placebo effect" is hogwash.
And in the context of a national health plan, it should improve the general health of all to endorse placebos. There are statistical effects as you describe when the placebos are distributed to millions of people.
That has so many layers, it is hard to get to the core of it. No, wait it isn't. The answer is: Homeopathy is a scam, period. No amount of beating around the bush changes that.
If you want to administer placebos to the population, don't call it homeopathy. There is one ethical and one business reason for that. The ethical reason is that it is not ok to lie like that. The business reason is that homeopathy is expensive and tap water is cheap. If you call it homeopathy, you will support all the scammers making expensive tap-water.
Two, while there are statistical effects, you are a crazy criminal if you use homeopathy to actually treat an individual patient with anything serious. The placebo effect is not individually reliable, and if your patient is unconscious, the effect is null. If there's a life or permanent damage on the line, you damn better have something that has an actual effect.
You can not apply statistics as solutions to individual cases. Statistically speaking, we are all 51% female and 49% male. You probably don't know many individuals who actually are like that.
The law basically "If you're going to abuse children keep it quiet."
Joining the catholic church also helps a lot. Let's not ignore in all this hysteria that the vast majority of child abuse does not originate with strangers looking for more material for their kiddie porn collection. Most culprits are known to the victim and often very close. Family members are the largest group, priests and other persons of implicit trust the second largest.
Legalized possession of images of child abuse allows a market for such things to grow larger that it would be otherwise, creating a demand for more child abuse. There could still be laws against profiting from child abuse, but the drug market has proved that where there is money to be made there will be supply.
Which idiots modded you "insightful" ?
Markets, by definition, have two orthogonal axes - demand and supply. You believe that more supply will create more demand, but very few markets work that way. What generally happens is that prices drop.
People don't eat more bread just because you bake more of it. Hollywood can produce twice as many movies and I'm quite sure that movie sales would not change all that much in total. The amount of music sold does not seem to depend on the number of bands that make it.
What the drug market proves is that making something illegal does not wipe out demand. So how do you come to the conclusion that the opposite works?
What happened to me was never reported.
With all sympathies - you can write about it on /. with your user account (that at least some people can link to you, I'm sure) and yet you can't report it?
Also a high percentage of people charged with child pornography crimes are also found to have sexual abused a child at some point.
[citation required]
When it comes to porn, I am quite certain that consumers and producers are two fairly distinct groups. I don't see why child porn should be the opposite. I can be convinced by facts, so please show them. And anecdotal evidence does not support a claim that begins with "a high percentag of ..." - to make such a claim, you need a representative sample size.
And people who would pleasure themselves to it are pedophiles!
Being a pedophile is not illegal. Harming kids is. There is a difference between the two. If we had thought crimes, I would be in jail for murder a dozen times over, every time some drunken asshole wakes up half the street in the middle of the night.
It sure sucked what happened to you, but in the case of child porn laws, there are victims on all sides, and some of them can be avoided by more reasonable laws. You do know that the burden of proof is on you? I could upload that video showing yourself to your computer and you would be jailed for possession of child pornography. Unless you can prove that you didn't put it there yourself. Oh yes, and you'd be registered as a sex criminal for the rest of your life, not allowed to live near a school or many other places, everyone would look at you funny, and you would definitely not enjoy explaining to them how that came about.
Maybe that thought experiment helps you understand the other side that wants to not protect kiddie fuckers, but those caught innocently in the drag nets. Yes, they exist. I've been online long enough, I've had people come to me asking for help who had used the Internet to get some cheap porn and there was kiddie porn mixed in. I've run across enough links to what I was sure was kiddie porn. Heck, if that had been recently, with all the pre-fetching of modern browsers, I would've probably been in posession of something.
Why do they test against placebos, rather than no treatment? Because placebos are more effective than no treatment. Placebos are better than nothing, and a whole lot cheaper than regular treatment.
No, that is not the reason.
They test against placebos because every actual drug also has the placebo effect. If you would test against nothing, you would - due to the placebo effect - almost always find that your "medicine" is effective, even if it is actually counter-productive. In many cases, you would have to administer a poison to get a null result.
That does not mean that placebos are an effective treatment. Note that it's still called the placebo effect and not the "placebo treatment" or the "placebo cure" or the "placebo medicine".
That's because placebo effects are a) unstable and b) context-sensitive. Changing the experiment from a double-blind to a simple blind test, for example, often dramatically reduces the placebo effect. Giving a placebo to an unconscious patient in emergency care will have no effect.
That's why placebos are not used as medicine in regular treatment. They are not reliable. The placebo effect is a statistical effect, measured over large samples. You can not count on it in an individual case.
Yes, of course. Or at least I am not aware of any real medically qualified people testing homeopathic bullshit on patients with real issues.
Homeopaths, of course, do it all the time. A couple of them have ended up in the news with their failures, some (too few if you ask me) have ended up in jail.
Easily identifyable physical objects? Yeah, sure. Please rob a bank or something, you're going to be the easiest catch since the guy who wrote the "hand me all your money" note on the back of his business card.
The best non-funny reply is actually something I heard maybe 10 years ago, allegedly a lesson a mother gave to her kid regarding TV: "Nothing on TV is real, including the news."
So, in a country as big as the U.S., with cities as large as ours, and as far-flung, where freedom of movement is important to our everyday lives, driving is suddenly a "choice"??
I'm done with this non-argument. You are ignoring my points, repeating yours with no additional supporting evidence and now you're trying a weak strawman.
So Adblock Plus it is, then.
They had one chance to convince us that they aren't evil, greedy bastards and meet us in the middle, with us accepting reasonable ads that don't mess with us in ways we don't like.
They fucked it up.
So I'll feel even more justified in recommending Adblock Plus to absolutely everyone whose browser window I ever see.
You didn't want to compromise, assholes, so for all I care, you can all go broke.
It's like the "Baby on Board" car signs
No, it isn't. That sign communicates a statement with a measurable truth value - either there is or there isn't actually a baby in the car, so you are either saying the truth or you are lying.
The DNT flag expresses a preference. The only person to judge its truth value is you. Basically, the car analogy equivalent would be a sticker saying "please don't drive too close".
Now continue your thought experiment regarding what would happen if everyone put that sticker on their car.
Along the same lines is the stance adopted by Digital Advertising Alliance. The alliance has revealed that it will only honor DNT if and only if it is not switched on by default.
This is why we need laws and regulations. This was obvious the minute DNT was announced. I think I posted a few comments back then. Of course they will find excuses to not honour it. If it weren't this one, it would be something different.
In an ideal world, they would be fined $1000 for every single time they ignore the flag, that would put them out of business within a week.
Of course, in the real world we live in, such ridiculous fines are reserved for unemployed mothers downloading a few music tracks for their kids.
And they are completely right. If you attend a university that does accept WP as a source, quit immediately and move to somewhere where your degree will actually be worth something.
It's not just athletes.
Porn stars, politicians, celebrities (B, C and further down) - basically anyone whose primary asset is fame will have a WP page, while most people whose primary asset is some actually meaningful contribution to mankind will not.
No, someone banks on them being really untraceable. I'm quite certain they plan to exchange them back to US$ fairly quickly. Meanwhile, bitcoins make a good storage.
Advertisement is full of lies. Who'd have thought? Colour me shocked. Shocked, I say!
It is terribly hard to build an auto-erase feature that will a) always work when it should and b) never trigger when it shouldn't.
That is over-engineering. You are trying to solve the problem by adding more layers of complexity.
The problem with that is ethical. Since there is no evidence that homeopathy works testing it on sick people would not survive any ethical review if it interfered with real treatment.
The real world doesn't work like that. Drugs, including placebo controls, are testing in double-blind tests on real patients with real issues, up to and including heart attacks.
Source: My ex studied this stuff. Yeah, she was a bit shocked at first, too.
I'm no fan of magic and witchcraft. I know it was something other than earache but those pills worked.
I don't mind utilizing the placebo effect.
What I do mind is that the NHS could've paid 1/100th for the same thing by simply setting up its own sugar pill factory and labelling the product with whatever strikes their fancy.