Gee, how did we possibly get from the 1600s to the 2000s without "Child Protective Services"?
How do you reconcile the idea of a person not being free to infringe on the rights of others with the notion that some people should have the right to stick needles into others?
Note the glaring contradiction in your analysis. You're advocating that we allow the U.S. federal government to take over the entire USA medical system. Yet, it is this very same government that pursues the policy of global military imperialism. There is no "other side" on this issue. We have two dominant political parties who have managed to exclude everyone else from the political system. Both of these parties agree on this aggressive foreign policy and global military presence.
The debate about vaccines in the public policy sphere is about whether or not the government can force you to inject something into your body. This is the government that spies on its citizens, engages in torture, incarcerates and assassinates its citizens without charge or trial, refuses to prosecute government employees for blatant criminal activity, etc. etc. You think I'm going to let them stick a needle in my arm and just trust their word that it's good for me? These people would inject U.S. citizens with the live AIDS virus or antibiotic resistant TB if it served their purposes. I think I'd rather borrow a needle from a junkie than a federal bureaucrat.
Not to say that there aren't PEDs for distance runners, but steroids improve the performance of sprinters, weightlifters and other athletes who benefit from larger more powerful muscles. Long distance runners wouldn't benefit by artificially increasing their muscle mass.
What do you mean "valid"? There are many valid studies which find a causal link between heart disease and obesity. Fat people are at higher risk for heart disease than their thinner counterparts. The suitably large sample size should provide some control for factors like stress. Are stressed out people at higher risk than calm people if you control for BMI? Probably, but that doesn't mean that studies linking obesity and heart disease are not valid.
"Too much exercise"? "high-intensity, high-mileage joggers"?
I figured the article was going to be discussing triathletes and ultra-marathon runners. Instead, it's talking about:
"people who... ran faster than 7 mph for more than 2.5 hours a week with a frequency of more than three times a week..."
That doesn't seem like very much. Running at 7 mph means doing an 8:35/mile pace, and 2.5 hours per week at that pace means 17 miles. I wouldn't call that "high intensity" and "high mileage".
No. It's better to have your kids become a mindless drone in the great hive of the public schools. Stand in lines, move on command, sit on command, eat on command, pledge allegiance to a flag, ask permission to go to the bathroom, etc. Home schooling is something parents do when they don't want to have their kids brainwashed by government propaganda and want to teach them critical thinking as opposed to blind submission to authority. It's especially important in their younger years, which is why government is always pushing to get control of your kids earlier and earlier. It's not necessary to keep your kids locked up 24/7 just because you prefer to spend 4-6 hours per day educating them as opposed to sending them to the zombie factory.
"Homeschooling is all about control and oppressiveness."
LOL Forcing kids to stand in lines, sit at desks in neat rows, pledge allegiance to a flag, maintain a code of silence, move when they are told, sit when they are told, eat when they are told, ask permission to use the bathroom, etc. etc. have nothing to do with control and oppression? Ha! Teaching kids to conform and not to question authority is a perfect way to produce zombies that the government can easily control and oppress.
Without governments spending trillions of dollars to create a transportation infrastructure entirely dependent on gas and diesel powered motor vehicles, there would be far fewer roads, far fewer cars, fewer auto-related deaths and injuries and much less pollution.
Suppose cars had been forced to compete with alternatives like rail on a level playing field? i.e. roads would only have been constructed with private capital and used only by paying customers. Had that been the case, rail transport would still be dominant and population centers would have grown around major rail hubs with cars and trucks used only for relatively short trips.
Instead, government killed the railroads through nationalization and decided to create the biggest corporate subsidy in history by forcing taxpayers to fund infrastructure specifically suited for gas and diesel powered vehicles. Much to the delight of big oil and the auto manufacturers. This in turn has led to urban sprawl, suburbia, massive destruction of wildlife habitat, smog, greenhouse gas emissions, all of those deaths and accidents we talked about. Not to mention all of the war and violence perpetrated to control petroleum resources.
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Fear of what devices designed to kill people might do if they were exclusively in the hands of government thugs and criminal thugs is hardly irrational.
There is no such thing as "gun control". There is only the idea of limiting firearms possession to a couple of small groups of people.
A. Government B. Criminals
And we all know that these two groups of people are so responsible, trustworthy and benevolent that we should trust them with the exclusive privilege of firearms ownership.
I'd much rather have the militiamen than the John Wayne-wannabes in the ATF, DEA and other armed government agencies.
Focusing only on "firearms deaths" as opposed to the overall rates of suicide and violent crime is ridiculous. The anti-gun movement is happy to use such bogus statistics and flawed or misleading data to push their agenda.
Pretending that gun control is going to save those lives presumes that people intent on murder will not use other means. Despite the fact that murderers use knives and blunt objects more frequently than firearms to commit their crimes. It also assumes that suicidal people will not attempt suicide because of limited accessibility of firearms. Nonsense.
Furthermore, and most ridiculous of all, it ignores the deterrent effect of private firearms ownership. Crimes are prevented every single day by people with firearms. Banning them might prevent a few "firearms related" deaths, but will cause an increase in muggings, home invasions, robberies and assaults as criminals prey on an unarmed populace. That's why the overall crime rate as opposed to "firearms" crime rate is the relevant statistic.
Pull out some data which shows a clear link between gun control and a decrease in the overall rate of violent or property crime and I'll take it seriously.
There are bad taxes, extremely bad taxes and hideously evil taxes. The inflation tax is the most evil and pernicious of all because it is so subtle and the mechanism so complex that people either don't know it's happening or don't understand how/why it's happening.
The income tax is the extremely bad tax. We should repeal the personal and corporate income tax entirely. You tax tobacco to dissuade smoking. Do you tax income and profit to dissuade working and producing? Replace the personal and corporate income tax with the "fair tax". (fairtax.org).
The least-bad taxes are consumption and use taxes. Want to build infrastructure? Raise the damned gas tax already! Make the people who use the service pay for it.
Despite the conventional economic idiocy, you cannot build a sustainable economy based on consumption when the bulk of the goods you are consuming are imported. The dirty little secret of the U.S. economy is that all of this spending, starting around the mid 1980s, and most of the so-called "GDP Growth" has been nothing but a massive bubble of consumer and government debt. Want to see a scary chart? Plot annual increases in GDP vs. increases in total outstanding debt (government + business + consumer) for the last 30 years. Minus debt, there have only been a few quarters of genuine GDP growth. 2008 should have been a wakeup call. We hit the "debt saturation point" and the economy crashed. There is simply no way to continue the 30 year borrowing party.
Why wouldn't Chernobyl be an ideal place to park nuclear waste? A large "exclusion zone" around the plant is already cordoned off with some degree of security. There have also been ongoing efforts to consolidate the waste and construct dry storage containment facilities for it. Just expand the construction project so that it has more capacity. The USA recently gave an enormous aid package to Ukraine, maybe they should return the favor by taking and storing some USA nuclear waste? Would it be too dangerous or risky to move it across the ocean and over/through Europe to get it there? Otherwise, why not?
I *think* what they're saying is that if they know it was you who bought the gas, took out the cash and ate at the restaurant, they can figure out that it was also you who went to the supermarket, and identify all of your other purchases for which they have records.
From what I can tell, they first need to know the identity of the individual who made those 3 particular purchases. From that, they can link the individual to the entire set of his/her purchases in the "anonymized" CC data. I'm very concerned about privacy issues, but this doesn't really surprise or disturb me. It would be quite a coincidence for another person to engage in transactions at the same three places I did and at approximately the same times.
That perception exists in the West because the people from India that we tend to encounter are 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean intelligence in a population of 1.2 billion.
Under this system, you get a tax "prebate" so that a poor person would still pay zero net tax over the course of the year. The consumption tax that they would pay on spending their meager income gets refunded before they pay it.
Think about it. Whether you're producing electronics or growing potatoes, work is the most productive activity in the economy. Consumption is the least productive. Furthermore, the ridiculously complicated tax code is where politicians love to include handouts to favored constituents. With the fair tax, the complexity disappears.
That's a very good question, but DARPA actually did define "counterfeit" in the SHIELD RFP. It was a very broad and very verbose definition that covered used and other sub-standard parts.
I think the most glaring example is in the area of financial regulators. The U.S. federal government has the SEC, OTS, CFTC, FDIC, OCC and a financial crimes unit of the FBI. Yet they FAILED to prevent the 2007 financial crisis and have FAILED to investigate and prosecute any of the big financial institutions for criminal activity? That undoubtedly demonstrates complicity or incompetence, but AFAIK, nobody in these agencies has been fired or reprimanded for their negligence/complicity. Rather than investigating WTF is wrong with all of these agencies and ferreting out the corrupt and incompetent, government's solution is to create a NEW regulatory agency. Add the CFPB to the above list!
Yes, the Americans who believe big government serves to protect us little people from the big bad corporations are either stupid or extremely misguided. All the new laws and regulations are meaningless when the regulatory agencies refuse to enforce them. Why spend billions of dollars paying these people to NOT do their jobs? If we fired them all, we'd get the same outcome for lower cost.
The concept of the "mind monkey" has been around for centuries in Buddhism. i.e. the mind sort of naturally jumps around like a monkey. When I took a yoga class that included meditation, the instructor said that you need to give your mind something to do. That's why you focus on your breathing. He said to let your thoughts come and go but treat them as if you were an outside observer and return your focus to your breath. The constant flow of information we have today absolutely must affect out psychology. Maybe our minds jump around even more? I think the goal of meditation remains the same.
I think that's precisely what I'd be do as well. I wouldn't be able to resist experimenting with the only electrical device in the room. At least once anyway.
The whole problem with corporations is that government grants them privilege without responsibility.
By shielding the executives from any personal civil responsibility by the nature of corporate law, AND shielding them from any criminal responsibility by failure to prosecute clear instances of criminal activity, the incentives become completely warped.
I agree that boycott is a good tool, but rich corporate execs should have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. We should also reform some of the limited civil liability provisions of corporate law and/or attach extra legal responsibilities in exchange for the legal privileges.
The government wrote the laws stating that execs are required to act in the best interests of their shareholder. I don't know why people get so angry at corporations behaving exactly how we should expect them to.
Nor do I understand why people who incessantly complain about corporations don't work on reforming corporate law. There is no reason why the legal privileges that come from incorporation cannot be balanced with a set of legal responsibilities. Right now however, their only responsibility is a single-minded focus on the bottom line.
The motors and defrosters can fail, but the mirror can still be adjusted and cleaned by hand. Once the camera fails, you're blind. Seems like a camera would be equally if not more vulnerable to ice buildup and more delicate to clean. For winter drivers, they cameras will also need to withstand months of being splattered with salt (or whatever other chemicals are used) and sand. I think I'll take my chances with the mirror.
The fact that we have differences of opinion is all the more reason for the government to butt out and let the manufacturers and consumers decide.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, how did we possibly get from the 1600s to the 2000s without "Child Protective Services"?
How do you reconcile the idea of a person not being free to infringe on the rights of others with the notion that some people should have the right to stick needles into others?
Note the glaring contradiction in your analysis. You're advocating that we allow the U.S. federal government to take over the entire USA medical system. Yet, it is this very same government that pursues the policy of global military imperialism. There is no "other side" on this issue. We have two dominant political parties who have managed to exclude everyone else from the political system. Both of these parties agree on this aggressive foreign policy and global military presence.
The debate about vaccines in the public policy sphere is about whether or not the government can force you to inject something into your body. This is the government that spies on its citizens, engages in torture, incarcerates and assassinates its citizens without charge or trial, refuses to prosecute government employees for blatant criminal activity, etc. etc. You think I'm going to let them stick a needle in my arm and just trust their word that it's good for me? These people would inject U.S. citizens with the live AIDS virus or antibiotic resistant TB if it served their purposes. I think I'd rather borrow a needle from a junkie than a federal bureaucrat.
Not to say that there aren't PEDs for distance runners, but steroids improve the performance of sprinters, weightlifters and other athletes who benefit from larger more powerful muscles. Long distance runners wouldn't benefit by artificially increasing their muscle mass.
What do you mean "valid"? There are many valid studies which find a causal link between heart disease and obesity. Fat people are at higher risk for heart disease than their thinner counterparts. The suitably large sample size should provide some control for factors like stress.
Are stressed out people at higher risk than calm people if you control for BMI? Probably, but that doesn't mean that studies linking obesity and heart disease are not valid.
"Too much exercise"?
"high-intensity, high-mileage joggers"?
I figured the article was going to be discussing triathletes and ultra-marathon runners. Instead, it's talking about:
"people who... ran faster than 7 mph for more than 2.5 hours a week with a frequency of more than three times a week..."
That doesn't seem like very much. Running at 7 mph means doing an 8:35/mile pace, and 2.5 hours per week at that pace means 17 miles. I wouldn't call that "high intensity" and "high mileage".
No. It's better to have your kids become a mindless drone in the great hive of the public schools. Stand in lines, move on command, sit on command, eat on command, pledge allegiance to a flag, ask permission to go to the bathroom, etc.
Home schooling is something parents do when they don't want to have their kids brainwashed by government propaganda and want to teach them critical thinking as opposed to blind submission to authority. It's especially important in their younger years, which is why government is always pushing to get control of your kids earlier and earlier.
It's not necessary to keep your kids locked up 24/7 just because you prefer to spend 4-6 hours per day educating them as opposed to sending them to the zombie factory.
"Homeschooling is all about control and oppressiveness."
LOL
Forcing kids to stand in lines, sit at desks in neat rows, pledge allegiance to a flag, maintain a code of silence, move when they are told, sit when they are told, eat when they are told, ask permission to use the bathroom, etc. etc. have nothing to do with control and oppression? Ha! Teaching kids to conform and not to question authority is a perfect way to produce zombies that the government can easily control and oppress.
Without governments spending trillions of dollars to create a transportation infrastructure entirely dependent on gas and diesel powered motor vehicles, there would be far fewer roads, far fewer cars, fewer auto-related deaths and injuries and much less pollution.
Suppose cars had been forced to compete with alternatives like rail on a level playing field? i.e. roads would only have been constructed with private capital and used only by paying customers. Had that been the case, rail transport would still be dominant and population centers would have grown around major rail hubs with cars and trucks used only for relatively short trips.
Instead, government killed the railroads through nationalization and decided to create the biggest corporate subsidy in history by forcing taxpayers to fund infrastructure specifically suited for gas and diesel powered vehicles. Much to the delight of big oil and the auto manufacturers. This in turn has led to urban sprawl, suburbia, massive destruction of wildlife habitat, smog, greenhouse gas emissions, all of those deaths and accidents we talked about. Not to mention all of the war and violence perpetrated to control petroleum resources.
Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Fear of what devices designed to kill people might do if they were exclusively in the hands of government thugs and criminal thugs is hardly irrational.
There is no such thing as "gun control". There is only the idea of limiting firearms possession to a couple of small groups of people.
A. Government
B. Criminals
And we all know that these two groups of people are so responsible, trustworthy and benevolent that we should trust them with the exclusive privilege of firearms ownership.
I'd much rather have the militiamen than the John Wayne-wannabes in the ATF, DEA and other armed government agencies.
Focusing only on "firearms deaths" as opposed to the overall rates of suicide and violent crime is ridiculous. The anti-gun movement is happy to use such bogus statistics and flawed or misleading data to push their agenda.
Pretending that gun control is going to save those lives presumes that people intent on murder will not use other means. Despite the fact that murderers use knives and blunt objects more frequently than firearms to commit their crimes. It also assumes that suicidal people will not attempt suicide because of limited accessibility of firearms. Nonsense.
Furthermore, and most ridiculous of all, it ignores the deterrent effect of private firearms ownership. Crimes are prevented every single day by people with firearms. Banning them might prevent a few "firearms related" deaths, but will cause an increase in muggings, home invasions, robberies and assaults as criminals prey on an unarmed populace. That's why the overall crime rate as opposed to "firearms" crime rate is the relevant statistic.
Pull out some data which shows a clear link between gun control and a decrease in the overall rate of violent or property crime and I'll take it seriously.
There are bad taxes, extremely bad taxes and hideously evil taxes. The inflation tax is the most evil and pernicious of all because it is so subtle and the mechanism so complex that people either don't know it's happening or don't understand how/why it's happening.
The income tax is the extremely bad tax. We should repeal the personal and corporate income tax entirely. You tax tobacco to dissuade smoking. Do you tax income and profit to dissuade working and producing? Replace the personal and corporate income tax with the "fair tax". (fairtax.org).
The least-bad taxes are consumption and use taxes. Want to build infrastructure? Raise the damned gas tax already! Make the people who use the service pay for it.
Despite the conventional economic idiocy, you cannot build a sustainable economy based on consumption when the bulk of the goods you are consuming are imported. The dirty little secret of the U.S. economy is that all of this spending, starting around the mid 1980s, and most of the so-called "GDP Growth" has been nothing but a massive bubble of consumer and government debt. Want to see a scary chart? Plot annual increases in GDP vs. increases in total outstanding debt (government + business + consumer) for the last 30 years. Minus debt, there have only been a few quarters of genuine GDP growth. 2008 should have been a wakeup call. We hit the "debt saturation point" and the economy crashed. There is simply no way to continue the 30 year borrowing party.
Why wouldn't Chernobyl be an ideal place to park nuclear waste? A large "exclusion zone" around the plant is already cordoned off with some degree of security. There have also been ongoing efforts to consolidate the waste and construct dry storage containment facilities for it. Just expand the construction project so that it has more capacity.
The USA recently gave an enormous aid package to Ukraine, maybe they should return the favor by taking and storing some USA nuclear waste?
Would it be too dangerous or risky to move it across the ocean and over/through Europe to get it there? Otherwise, why not?
I *think* what they're saying is that if they know it was you who bought the gas, took out the cash and ate at the restaurant, they can figure out that it was also you who went to the supermarket, and identify all of your other purchases for which they have records.
From what I can tell, they first need to know the identity of the individual who made those 3 particular purchases. From that, they can link the individual to the entire set of his/her purchases in the "anonymized" CC data.
I'm very concerned about privacy issues, but this doesn't really surprise or disturb me. It would be quite a coincidence for another person to engage in transactions at the same three places I did and at approximately the same times.
" Indians are just good at science."
That perception exists in the West because the people from India that we tend to encounter are 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean intelligence in a population of 1.2 billion.
Repeal the corporate income tax and personal income tax in favor of a consumption tax. Now, before you can say "that will hurt the poor" check out
http://fairtax.org/
Under this system, you get a tax "prebate" so that a poor person would still pay zero net tax over the course of the year. The consumption tax that they would pay on spending their meager income gets refunded before they pay it.
Think about it. Whether you're producing electronics or growing potatoes, work is the most productive activity in the economy. Consumption is the least productive. Furthermore, the ridiculously complicated tax code is where politicians love to include handouts to favored constituents. With the fair tax, the complexity disappears.
That's a very good question, but DARPA actually did define "counterfeit" in the SHIELD RFP. It was a very broad and very verbose definition that covered used and other sub-standard parts.
Their broad definition of "counterfeit" includes the cheap knockoffs that might be functionally equivalent but substandard.
Exactly.
I think the most glaring example is in the area of financial regulators. The U.S. federal government has the SEC, OTS, CFTC, FDIC, OCC and a financial crimes unit of the FBI.
Yet they FAILED to prevent the 2007 financial crisis and have FAILED to investigate and prosecute any of the big financial institutions for criminal activity? That undoubtedly demonstrates complicity or incompetence, but AFAIK, nobody in these agencies has been fired or reprimanded for their negligence/complicity.
Rather than investigating WTF is wrong with all of these agencies and ferreting out the corrupt and incompetent, government's solution is to create a NEW regulatory agency. Add the CFPB to the above list!
Yes, the Americans who believe big government serves to protect us little people from the big bad corporations are either stupid or extremely misguided. All the new laws and regulations are meaningless when the regulatory agencies refuse to enforce them. Why spend billions of dollars paying these people to NOT do their jobs? If we fired them all, we'd get the same outcome for lower cost.
The big telecoms are perennially in the top 20 companies/organizations in terms of annual lobbying expenditure. In 2012 for example:
https://www.opensecrets.org/lo...
#10 AT&T $17,460,000
#15 Verizon $15,220,000
#16 Comcast $14,750,000
Imagine what they dump into PACs and campaign contributions? How many regulators are past or future execs in these companies?
The concept of the "mind monkey" has been around for centuries in Buddhism. i.e. the mind sort of naturally jumps around like a monkey. When I took a yoga class that included meditation, the instructor said that you need to give your mind something to do. That's why you focus on your breathing. He said to let your thoughts come and go but treat them as if you were an outside observer and return your focus to your breath.
The constant flow of information we have today absolutely must affect out psychology. Maybe our minds jump around even more? I think the goal of meditation remains the same.
I think that's precisely what I'd be do as well. I wouldn't be able to resist experimenting with the only electrical device in the room. At least once anyway.
The whole problem with corporations is that government grants them privilege without responsibility.
By shielding the executives from any personal civil responsibility by the nature of corporate law, AND shielding them from any criminal responsibility by failure to prosecute clear instances of criminal activity, the incentives become completely warped.
I agree that boycott is a good tool, but rich corporate execs should have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. We should also reform some of the limited civil liability provisions of corporate law and/or attach extra legal responsibilities in exchange for the legal privileges.
The government wrote the laws stating that execs are required to act in the best interests of their shareholder. I don't know why people get so angry at corporations behaving exactly how we should expect them to.
Nor do I understand why people who incessantly complain about corporations don't work on reforming corporate law. There is no reason why the legal privileges that come from incorporation cannot be balanced with a set of legal responsibilities. Right now however, their only responsibility is a single-minded focus on the bottom line.
The motors and defrosters can fail, but the mirror can still be adjusted and cleaned by hand. Once the camera fails, you're blind. Seems like a camera would be equally if not more vulnerable to ice buildup and more delicate to clean. For winter drivers, they cameras will also need to withstand months of being splattered with salt (or whatever other chemicals are used) and sand. I think I'll take my chances with the mirror.
The fact that we have differences of opinion is all the more reason for the government to butt out and let the manufacturers and consumers decide.