All you're saying is that there's room for uncertainty in what causes autism. That's fine, and I'm not disputing that. What I am disputing is that we should speculate that vaccines cause it without evidence. I have not seen this evidence from knowledgeable people, only bad conclusions drawn from most-likely-coincidental correlation. The current scientific evidence strongly suggests that vaccines do not cause autism. Unless someone has good evidence (as in, researched, and potential for scientific validity) to bring to the table, I am not going to take them seriously. If they try to sway public opinion in a dangerous direction without said evidence, then I'm not going to respect that person in the slightest.
In this case, no-one has managed to show a link. Correlation does not equal causation, and coincidence does not equal correlation. The only proof available is that autism rose at roughly the same time as certain vaccines, and some anecdotes that the autism "started" about when vaccines were taken. The former has been explained, and the latter has not held up to scientific scrutiny. Again, I'm not saying that its impossible for vaccines to cause autism, but that there is no evidence that it does.
Just saying that the science may be wrong is meaningless, especially when its been tested and, according to our best knowledge, it isn't. Scientific knowledge is fluid, and it can change, but you have to bring in the new evidence, formulate new hypothesis or theories, and then test those.
As far as the mother and public safety goes, we have evidence that the vaccine helps. We understand the risk of the vaccine, and its extremely likely that it does not cause autism. The fact that this mother is emotionally distraught over her autistic kid is not evidence to the contrary. I'm certainly not going to respect people who endanger their kids and the public because they're being skeptical for no good reason (and no, distrust of doctors and scientists are not a good reason).
I'm not missing the point. Yes all those things may be true, but if they are then there will be evidence for them. Yes, some people have been mocked despite having evidence. In many cases they were eventually proven out. This is not one of those cases. This lady believes that the vaccine causes autism because she wants it to be true. The evidence is not on her side. This unsupported cause is causing ignorant people to stop vaccinations, which is eroding our herd immunity. This is dangerous to society. She deserves to be mocked because of this.
I don't agree that, because some people were not taken seriously in the past, you must take similar people seriously now. Again, the Wright Brothers/Bozo the Clown comment applies. If this woman wants me to take her seriously, she needs to support her claims. She has not, so I won't.
And? Do you have an actual scientific argument to make concerning the methodology of that study? If there is a problem with the study, it can be attacked scientifically. If the results are accurate, then it doesn't matter who payed for it.
The court didn't. Scientists did studies which found that vaccines don't cause autism. The court took that evidence, and made a ruling in this one case.
People are mocking the questioners in this case because they have no evidence. There is no proven link. There have been scientific studies and they have been reproduced and vetted.
Your examples of racist studies are not applicable, because those could be questioned and debated based on their scientific merit, of which there was little. In this case, we have studies that show no link, and rather than question those studies', the people in question are sticking their fingers in their ears, going "Nuh uh!" and regurgitating the SAME DIS-PROVEN ARGUMENTS.
They are not being mocked because they are questioning authority. They are being mocked because they are blatantly, willfully ignorant. They are being mocked because they are encouraging the same blatant, willful ignorance in others, and that ignorance poses a very real and clear danger to others.
Many people have stood up to authority and have not been mocked. These people had evidence. These people did their due diligence in making sure that they knew what they were talking about. The woman in question is not one of these people. People laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: this woman is the latter, not the former.
If you don't agree with that, then offer some new evidence. Try to make it some that hasn't been disproven repeatedly.
For one company. That company's competitors will jump at the fact to offer a vaccine. What do they care if its not repeat business? Some money is better than none, and they don't care about your recurring money train.
There is not one "big" pharma company. There are many. If pharma company A has a treatment, and pharma company B develops a cure, then pharma company B has taken all of company A's profit. It doesn't matter that its a one-time cure rather than a treatment; they are making more profit than they did before.
And there's also the fact that there's a huge amount of non-profit research put into treating hot-button diseases. Tons of money is being dumped into AIDs and cancer research.
The whole "pharma companies are holding back the cures" line is bullshit, thought up by people looking for a reason to bitch about the fact that we can't cure everything. The reality is that a lot of these diseases, like AIDs and cancer, are extremely difficult to cure.
No-one is blindly trusting big pharma companies. Research has been done, studies have been run, and no link has been found. Pharma companies aren't exactly altruistic, but if you are going to make accusations of mass manipulation and cover-ups then you need to show some friggen evidence, rather than just spew unsupported paranoia.
Diseases can mutate. If it incubates in the un-immunized population, we can get strains that are resistant to the immunization. It also puts people who cannot take the immunization, due to allergies or immunity conditions, at risk.
Given the commentary on the Reiser trial, I think his assumption is a pretty safe bet. Techies, especially on Slashdot, regularly come up with stupid and asinine ideas about the legal system. Myself included.
And the only thing in that passage that suggests federal-level involvement is "In 1995, the GSEs began receiving government incentive payments for purchasing mortgage backed securities which included loans to low income borrowers." It doesn't cite under which legislation, or why, they received government incentive payments.
I want specific information about what federal involvement is responsible. So far, the only legislation I have been pointed to has been the CRA, which is flat-out not responsible for the current mess.
Your information tells me nothing other than banks made risky loans which I already know.
No, it was founded under the assumption that the federal government is necessary for some things, but needs to be closely watched, monitored, and limited. The Articles of Confederation actually provided a weaker national-level government, and it failed.
I have a Macbook and a Linux box. I also used Vista. UAC was never, ever as bad for me as the detractors claimed, and I am still left feeling that the hate was completely unjustified. I've never seen it pop up two UAC boxes. Every time I saw it, it was because I was accessing an admin-only area of the system, with the one exception of Visual Studio (one click on startup).
No, I don't think Vista is significantly worse than either Linux or Mac OSX. In fact, I don't really prefer one of these systems over the other. From my point of view, there is not enough of a difference between them for me to care.
How is swiping your license different than them carding you? I Mean, I suppose they could add you to their private database, but I'm not really seeing the risk here.
What happened to it? UAC was panned by Slashdot, panned by the press, panned by Apple, panned by developers, and hated by users. Everyone blamed Microsoft for "breaking things" and "annoying prompts" when it was the crappy application developers' fault in the first place.
The moral of the story is that people don't care what's technically correct. They just want their apps to work. Microsoft absolutely can roll over on this issue, because their customers want them to.
Yeah, you could be completely faithful and monogamous, and then your wife/husband cheats on you. Suddenly, you have the disease despite living a lifestyle that is completely safe.
And most technical people and a good chunk of the business people would love to just have a single portal servicing the globe. The problem is 1) the people who produce the product like to segment the market and will put pressure on you to do so, and 2) layers and legal restrictions. Do you think Amazon coded up IP checks just for fun? I'm reasonably sure that there quite a few engineers and businesspeople over there that are just as annoyed about having to implement a "worthless" feature as you are.
No, that's a strawman. I never said that private companies couldn't build a wind farm, and I never said that I couldn't imagine that they would. What I said is that a company isn't stepping up and building a wind farm.
And yes, I could convince friends, family, and neighbors to build a wind farm... except none of us have the capital to do so. So what can we do? Well, we can get together with everyone and agree that we pool our money for some projects that benefit us all. Maybe we disagree on what. OK, so lets compromise and put it to a vote. Well hey, that's government!
Our founding fathers were against taxation without representation, not taxation altogether. The entire reason that they made the constitution was because the government established by the Articles of Confederation was too weak and underfunded. A libertarian's wet dream, sure, but apparently it didn't work so well.
To portray it as forcing is an appeal to emotion. You have a vote, and you have a voice in how your tax money is used. No, it doesn't get used completely on things that benefit you. That's compromise. You can move to another state or another country if you disagree - you have that freedom. You can also voice your opinion and try to change my mind - that's politics.
But go ahead and try to make people feel bad for not wanting to have a race to the bottom in selfish greed. I'm sure that strategy is really working out for you.
Germany's population is 82 million and its GDP is 3 trillion. By your numbers, US military bases contribute $17 billion worth of income and about a million soldiers. We're talking less than 0.6% of Germany's GDP and between 1%-2% of Germany's population. Sure it'd hurt - a bit. We're not talking total economic collapse here. Your numbers simply don't add up.
Companies will only answer to the customer if it becomes a hot issue too. Do you think Comcast gave a shit when my internet connection wasn't working? Given that they refused to fix it for a month, they sure didn't seem to. Any sufficiently large company is not going to care about their customers unless those customers collectively make them. In other words, unless it becomes a hot-issue and they are in danger of losing a lot of them. Like a politician. You're also ignoring the fact that even though election comes up only periodically, they have to keep their constituents happy pretty much over the entire term. Polls matter.
Now, I'm not saying its exactly the same. Thats a strawman. What I was getting at is that the flow of money is similar enough that the argument of government being a black hole is silly. But to claim that companies are accountable and government is unaccountable is blatantly false. Companies are far less accountable than you think, and governments significantly more.
I've never been in the military, but I was in a military family and did odd jobs for them for summer employment. I've also worked at a taxpayer funded institution and private companies. My experience is that government work is not appreciably less efficient than private businesses.
I used to think otherwise, until I saw how hilariously inefficient most businesses are.
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All you're saying is that there's room for uncertainty in what causes autism. That's fine, and I'm not disputing that. What I am disputing is that we should speculate that vaccines cause it without evidence. I have not seen this evidence from knowledgeable people, only bad conclusions drawn from most-likely-coincidental correlation. The current scientific evidence strongly suggests that vaccines do not cause autism. Unless someone has good evidence (as in, researched, and potential for scientific validity) to bring to the table, I am not going to take them seriously. If they try to sway public opinion in a dangerous direction without said evidence, then I'm not going to respect that person in the slightest.
In this case, no-one has managed to show a link. Correlation does not equal causation, and coincidence does not equal correlation. The only proof available is that autism rose at roughly the same time as certain vaccines, and some anecdotes that the autism "started" about when vaccines were taken. The former has been explained, and the latter has not held up to scientific scrutiny. Again, I'm not saying that its impossible for vaccines to cause autism, but that there is no evidence that it does.
Just saying that the science may be wrong is meaningless, especially when its been tested and, according to our best knowledge, it isn't. Scientific knowledge is fluid, and it can change, but you have to bring in the new evidence, formulate new hypothesis or theories, and then test those.
As far as the mother and public safety goes, we have evidence that the vaccine helps. We understand the risk of the vaccine, and its extremely likely that it does not cause autism. The fact that this mother is emotionally distraught over her autistic kid is not evidence to the contrary. I'm certainly not going to respect people who endanger their kids and the public because they're being skeptical for no good reason (and no, distrust of doctors and scientists are not a good reason).
No, you just don't understand adaptation and herd immunity. Some remedial biology classes may be in order.
I'm not missing the point. Yes all those things may be true, but if they are then there will be evidence for them. Yes, some people have been mocked despite having evidence. In many cases they were eventually proven out. This is not one of those cases. This lady believes that the vaccine causes autism because she wants it to be true. The evidence is not on her side. This unsupported cause is causing ignorant people to stop vaccinations, which is eroding our herd immunity. This is dangerous to society. She deserves to be mocked because of this.
I don't agree that, because some people were not taken seriously in the past, you must take similar people seriously now. Again, the Wright Brothers/Bozo the Clown comment applies. If this woman wants me to take her seriously, she needs to support her claims. She has not, so I won't.
And? Do you have an actual scientific argument to make concerning the methodology of that study? If there is a problem with the study, it can be attacked scientifically. If the results are accurate, then it doesn't matter who payed for it.
The court didn't. Scientists did studies which found that vaccines don't cause autism. The court took that evidence, and made a ruling in this one case.
People are mocking the questioners in this case because they have no evidence. There is no proven link. There have been scientific studies and they have been reproduced and vetted.
Your examples of racist studies are not applicable, because those could be questioned and debated based on their scientific merit, of which there was little. In this case, we have studies that show no link, and rather than question those studies', the people in question are sticking their fingers in their ears, going "Nuh uh!" and regurgitating the SAME DIS-PROVEN ARGUMENTS.
They are not being mocked because they are questioning authority. They are being mocked because they are blatantly, willfully ignorant. They are being mocked because they are encouraging the same blatant, willful ignorance in others, and that ignorance poses a very real and clear danger to others.
Many people have stood up to authority and have not been mocked. These people had evidence. These people did their due diligence in making sure that they knew what they were talking about. The woman in question is not one of these people. People laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: this woman is the latter, not the former.
If you don't agree with that, then offer some new evidence. Try to make it some that hasn't been disproven repeatedly.
For one company. That company's competitors will jump at the fact to offer a vaccine. What do they care if its not repeat business? Some money is better than none, and they don't care about your recurring money train.
There is not one "big" pharma company. There are many. If pharma company A has a treatment, and pharma company B develops a cure, then pharma company B has taken all of company A's profit. It doesn't matter that its a one-time cure rather than a treatment; they are making more profit than they did before.
And there's also the fact that there's a huge amount of non-profit research put into treating hot-button diseases. Tons of money is being dumped into AIDs and cancer research.
The whole "pharma companies are holding back the cures" line is bullshit, thought up by people looking for a reason to bitch about the fact that we can't cure everything. The reality is that a lot of these diseases, like AIDs and cancer, are extremely difficult to cure.
3) Some people cannot be immunized, due to weakened immune systems or allergies, and you are putting those people at risk.
No-one is blindly trusting big pharma companies. Research has been done, studies have been run, and no link has been found. Pharma companies aren't exactly altruistic, but if you are going to make accusations of mass manipulation and cover-ups then you need to show some friggen evidence, rather than just spew unsupported paranoia.
Diseases can mutate. If it incubates in the un-immunized population, we can get strains that are resistant to the immunization. It also puts people who cannot take the immunization, due to allergies or immunity conditions, at risk.
This is high-school level biology.
More succinctly put, Ad Hominem is not Latin for "That's mean!"
Given the commentary on the Reiser trial, I think his assumption is a pretty safe bet. Techies, especially on Slashdot, regularly come up with stupid and asinine ideas about the legal system. Myself included.
And the only thing in that passage that suggests federal-level involvement is "In 1995, the GSEs began receiving government incentive payments for purchasing mortgage backed securities which included loans to low income borrowers." It doesn't cite under which legislation, or why, they received government incentive payments.
I want specific information about what federal involvement is responsible. So far, the only legislation I have been pointed to has been the CRA, which is flat-out not responsible for the current mess.
Your information tells me nothing other than banks made risky loans which I already know.
No, it was founded under the assumption that the federal government is necessary for some things, but needs to be closely watched, monitored, and limited. The Articles of Confederation actually provided a weaker national-level government, and it failed.
I wish people would remember THAT.
What poor lending standards would those be?
I have a Macbook and a Linux box. I also used Vista. UAC was never, ever as bad for me as the detractors claimed, and I am still left feeling that the hate was completely unjustified. I've never seen it pop up two UAC boxes. Every time I saw it, it was because I was accessing an admin-only area of the system, with the one exception of Visual Studio (one click on startup).
No, I don't think Vista is significantly worse than either Linux or Mac OSX. In fact, I don't really prefer one of these systems over the other. From my point of view, there is not enough of a difference between them for me to care.
How is swiping your license different than them carding you? I Mean, I suppose they could add you to their private database, but I'm not really seeing the risk here.
What happened to it? UAC was panned by Slashdot, panned by the press, panned by Apple, panned by developers, and hated by users. Everyone blamed Microsoft for "breaking things" and "annoying prompts" when it was the crappy application developers' fault in the first place.
The moral of the story is that people don't care what's technically correct. They just want their apps to work. Microsoft absolutely can roll over on this issue, because their customers want them to.
Yeah, you could be completely faithful and monogamous, and then your wife/husband cheats on you. Suddenly, you have the disease despite living a lifestyle that is completely safe.
And most technical people and a good chunk of the business people would love to just have a single portal servicing the globe. The problem is 1) the people who produce the product like to segment the market and will put pressure on you to do so, and 2) layers and legal restrictions. Do you think Amazon coded up IP checks just for fun? I'm reasonably sure that there quite a few engineers and businesspeople over there that are just as annoyed about having to implement a "worthless" feature as you are.
No, that's a strawman. I never said that private companies couldn't build a wind farm, and I never said that I couldn't imagine that they would. What I said is that a company isn't stepping up and building a wind farm.
And yes, I could convince friends, family, and neighbors to build a wind farm... except none of us have the capital to do so. So what can we do? Well, we can get together with everyone and agree that we pool our money for some projects that benefit us all. Maybe we disagree on what. OK, so lets compromise and put it to a vote. Well hey, that's government!
Our founding fathers were against taxation without representation, not taxation altogether. The entire reason that they made the constitution was because the government established by the Articles of Confederation was too weak and underfunded. A libertarian's wet dream, sure, but apparently it didn't work so well.
To portray it as forcing is an appeal to emotion. You have a vote, and you have a voice in how your tax money is used. No, it doesn't get used completely on things that benefit you. That's compromise. You can move to another state or another country if you disagree - you have that freedom. You can also voice your opinion and try to change my mind - that's politics.
But go ahead and try to make people feel bad for not wanting to have a race to the bottom in selfish greed. I'm sure that strategy is really working out for you.
Germany's population is 82 million and its GDP is 3 trillion. By your numbers, US military bases contribute $17 billion worth of income and about a million soldiers. We're talking less than 0.6% of Germany's GDP and between 1%-2% of Germany's population. Sure it'd hurt - a bit. We're not talking total economic collapse here. Your numbers simply don't add up.
Companies will only answer to the customer if it becomes a hot issue too. Do you think Comcast gave a shit when my internet connection wasn't working? Given that they refused to fix it for a month, they sure didn't seem to. Any sufficiently large company is not going to care about their customers unless those customers collectively make them. In other words, unless it becomes a hot-issue and they are in danger of losing a lot of them. Like a politician. You're also ignoring the fact that even though election comes up only periodically, they have to keep their constituents happy pretty much over the entire term. Polls matter.
Now, I'm not saying its exactly the same. Thats a strawman. What I was getting at is that the flow of money is similar enough that the argument of government being a black hole is silly. But to claim that companies are accountable and government is unaccountable is blatantly false. Companies are far less accountable than you think, and governments significantly more.
I've never been in the military, but I was in a military family and did odd jobs for them for summer employment. I've also worked at a taxpayer funded institution and private companies. My experience is that government work is not appreciably less efficient than private businesses.
I used to think otherwise, until I saw how hilariously inefficient most businesses are.