*facepalm* All what complications with the flu shot? Feeling queasy for an afternoon? Mild irritation at the injection site? Ok - don't get it if you're allegic to eggs. You're more likely to die from the flu outright than come down with the only major complication, Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Vaccines are one of the single greatest success stories of modern medicine. Our body is designed to fight off polio and smallpox too, but wasn't quite up to the task before vaccines.
If you or your aunt thinks getting vaccines is counter productive, you're morons.
Imagine, government programs encouraging not only a gay military, but gay nascar, gay oil rig roughnecks, gay crab fishermen. (Next on Discovery follow the crew of the SS Judy Garland as they battle the elements on The Queerest Catch.)
How long would it be before the religious right was up in arms protesting that we're encouraging the youth to "turn gay" because we're steering them to all the honorable professions.
If it was enacted by the state legislature, and now it's going to a vote, isn't that a measure to repeal a law that's already on the books?
A quick google confirms that Washington currently offers extensive rights to gay couples with domestic partnerships. If this ballot measure fails to pass, those rights will be revoked.
How many people do you think there are that fully support marriage equality (or the right to a civil union as the case may be here,) but really think we should ask the voters if it should be taken away.
My guess - there's orders of magnitude more people who have no idea what they were signing.
The general idea of the New Testement that Jesus set up a new more perfect covenant with humanity based mostly on the golden rule. Paul seemingly didn't quite learn the lesson with the lepers and the prostitutes and the tax collectors and the adulterers and the Samaritans and the whole do not pass judgment theme that runs pretty thick in the Gospels.
We still include his occasionally misogynistic and homophobic works because he, more than any other person including Jesus, was responsible for Christianity becoming a religion.
(1/3) Whether the gays came to her establishment or she set up a gay establishment is irrelevant. When the bulk of your business is selling stuff to gay people, you should think long and hard before biting the hand that feeds you. If you are convinced that your stand is honorable, accept your lumps. I do not condone harassment and threats should be taken seriously and investigated, but really, if her business were flourishing it wouldn't be an issue if she got some nasty phone calls. The real problem is that she's essentially out of work. (2) Is bullshit, and even if it weren't and this were only about the semantics of the word marriage, you've still got a "separate but equal" problem. (4)Churches have tax exempt status that is contingent on their separation from politics. To preach politics from the pulpit and still make use of the tax status is a violation of tax law. (5) You have a right to free speech. Law enforcement has an obligation to investigate any crimes committed against regardless of any speech you've made. You do not have a right to not to be called names, picketed, or even shouted at or offended because people don't like your speech (right up to the legal limit of harassment.) If any of those legal forms of counter-speech intimidate or make you fearful, then you do not have the right to speak free of fear or intimidation. The only way for that to be so would be to infringe on the free speech rights of others.
actually, that's Saturday - and Jesus said it was ok to work - and I don't think the punishment is death.
Odd though how the sabbath can move, adulterers don't have to be stoned to death anymore, and I can have a ham and havarti sandwich, but the gay is still verboten...
I do not condone intimidation. However, if you're afraid of the consequences of your political views, you should keep them to yourself.
There's nothing tragic about the El Coyote story. A woman made her living off of catering to the gay crowd, then publicly supported a movement that succeed in stripping a civil right from her clients. Shockingly, he clientele decided to boycott.
Finally, the involvement of churches in this political arena is of questionable legality and homophobia has always been immoral.
Married families are more stable and one partner provides a safety net for the other in case of job loss of medical issues so that the state doesn't have to step in. This is equally true for same and opposite marriage. The government should provide incentives such as tax breaks to any two consenting adults who want to make a public commitment to each other.
The guiding principles of western democracies are Liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
You'll find no single source, because it's been in constant evolution, but starting with the magna carta and working through the great philosophers of the enlightenment (especially Voltaire) there's been an unmistakable movement from despotism (even the benevolent variety) to open public society and personal freedom. It's hard to argue that either the suppression of government petitions or the continued persecution of gays is in line with the rights and privileges of the western moral system.
Incidentally, that's why a "strict constructionist" judicial philosophy is really at odds with western values - we don't have sacred texts, we value constantly and continuing expanding personal freedoms.
In a democracy there are two ways to participate in politics. One is to exercise your right to vote in secret. The other is to publicly organize. A petition is not a vote, it's a public statement that "I support initiative X." As a public statement the speaker assumes the risks associated with speaking out in public - such as the possibility that your friends and neighbors will find out your opinions. Intimidation and harassment are illegal and these laws should be enforced, but petitions are public for a reason and should stay public regardless of whether or not some bad actors will do bad things. Participating publicly in politics is risky, which is why you're under no obligation to do so. If signature gathering efforts for ballot initiatives or to get a candidate on a ballot become private they risk becoming about as important as internet petitions and polls. When you sign a petition, you're literally putting your name on the line - which is what gives them the impact that they have - if it's anonymous and cannot be publicly verified no one will believe you when you say we have Y signatures. What's more these are most certainly not new tactics - the declaration of independence was essentially a petition, and the signatories certainly faced consequences for attaching their names to the document. Do you suppose that the declaration would be held in such high esteem had it been signed by BenLightning and SamTEHdrunk?
That's not quite right. We're less concerned with their reactors than we are with their enrichment facilities. In order for a reactor to create Pu-239, it can't look anything like a civilian power plant - you need a way of moving U-238 in and out of the core.
The reason we're not exactly clear on what Iran is doing or intends to do is because we haven't been let in to their covert enrichment facilities. We know their reactors are not well suited to the production of weapons grade plutonium, and we're monitoring them. We don't know exactly whether their enrichment facilities are capable of producing sufficient quantities of U-235 for weapons purposes because we haven't been allowed to monitor Qom yet to our satisfaction.
There's no such thing as a 100% efficient scrubber. Emissions from coal plants are way down compared to the 70s, but we burn a lot of coal, so even a very high efficiency scrubber still lets a lot of pollutants through. And then there's China - who's emission standards aren't all that rigorous.
So once the scrubber is done taking the bulk of the pollutants out of the flue gasses, where does the contaminated water go? I'm not worried about mercury that's buried in a lump of coal in Pennsylvania, I am worried about mercury that goes from flue to scrubber to holding pond to water supply to salmon farm.
Oh, and incidentally, I'm more worried about 1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry somehow breaching containment than I am about the 20 ci of I-131 that was released from three mile island.
Then when you start considering CO2 as a pollutant (as SCOTUS has ordered the EPA to do) coal power starts looking very grim very fast.
But hey Pennsylvania is an politically important state, so as long as special interests run ads during election season promising vaporware "clean coal" I'm sure you have nothing to worry about - after all those EtOH ads in Iowa are working great too...
Your romanticization of violence sort of falls apart when you stop looking at flukes like Columbine where middle class disaffected teenagers have never experienced violence and start looking at the every day violence in the inner city. Kids don't get shot or stabbed downtown because they've been bottling it up too long.
shocking that there are impoverished and crime ridden minority areas in states that legally had sundown towns until 40 years ago...
Suburban sprawl is an economic effect - the fact that one ethnic group is wildly over represented can only be explained by racial causes. No one chooses to live in a ghetto, if only white people have the resources to get out - that's a racial problem.
linky top 10 net recipients of federal tax money (dollars received per dollars contributed):
New Mexico $2.03 Mississippi $2.02 Alaska $1.84 Louisiana $1.78 West Virginia $1.76 North Dakota $1.68 Alabama $1.66 South Dakota $1.53 Kentucky $1.51 Virginia $1.51
The only southern states that contribute more than they recieve are Texas and Florida, at 94 and 97 cents on the dollar respectively. What this really means is that southern states are poorer than Northern States, which we've known since before there were two Carolinas... It also means that if rational self interest guided one's politics southerners would be screaming for higher federal tax rates - unfortunately that all ended with the civil rights movement and Nixon's southern strategy.
Considering that they won't know that it's high-mortality until it actually kills of tons of people,
Maybe, maybe not. This case in particular illustrates one way we can have plenty of warning - the disease was first spotted at the tail end of the flu season and we got to watch it develop in the southern hemisphere and learn A LOT between April and August. Had this flu strain proved to be particularly deadly, we would have known by July - and at that point the vaccine production was already well on its way. (obviously in the interim, a lot of people in the southern hemisphere would have died if the disease were particularly deadly, but that doesn't stop us from protecting our population - the same would be true in reverse if the disease had popped up in the northern hemisphere's summer or early fall.)
I'm not scoffing at the idea that hand washing and self-quarantine are effective measures, just pointing out that widespread vaccination resulting in herd immunity is more effective. There are somethings you can't control, sometimes you just get sneezed on. An effective and mandatory vaccination program can save a lot of lives - like it did and continues to do with measles.
The message isn't getting out, because people have placed too much emphasis on a "cure", and not on prevention.
There's only so much you can change human behavior. School children in particular will never be as hygienic as you may want them to be. Vaccination isn't a cure - it is a preventative measure.
well you're right about people over 52 possessing partial immunity. I'm not sure if there has been any analysis on whether the H1N1 vaccine provides any additional boost to immunity, but it may.
You're not twice as likely to catch the swine flu if you've gotten flu vaccines in previous years. There was an interesting study done in Canada that found increased incidence of H1N1 among those who received the seasonal flu shot this year. As is oft repeated on slashdot correlation is not causation. Additionally, no one else has been able to reproduce these findings - it could be a quirk of confidence intervals or just plain bad methodology. The canadian data isn't published and hasn't been released. The CDC has looked at their data and found no such connection, and neither has anyone else. one source
If you're not in a high risk group (pregnant, compromised immune system, obese, very young, health care worker etc.) it's a good idea to get the vaccine when it becomes available, but no one's going to make you. If you're in a high risk group it's a really good idea to get the shot, but still no one's going to make you - unless you're a health care worker in New York.
At this point the swine flu isn't very news worthy, with the exception that the media plays an important roll in public health announcements like, "the vaccine will be available soon." In April, when we first found out that there was a novel flu strain it was very news worthy.
Finally, I'm going to repeat what I thought was the most important point of my initial post. What should the government do if a high mortality rate disease breaks out for which a vaccine exists?
The RIAA goes after uploaders because it's easier, not because downloading is legal.
It's a bit of an open question as to who is making the copy in a upload/download arrangement, and it's pretty easy to argue either side. In order to prosecute downloaders the RIAA would essentially have to host copyright material, which they don't want to do because, first, it involves putting something they don't want copied on the web, and second, if they're hosting it, you can make a reasonable argument that what you downloaded was implicitly authorized.
I too am a skeptic, but the reason for the initial panic, which in retrospect was clearly overblown, is that unlike "normal" flu strains, no one has any immunity to this swine flu. When news first broke, we didn't know that the fatality rate would turn out to be similar to that of the seasonal flu, rather than the spanish flu epidemic. So at the very least there were more differences between the swine flu and seasonal flu than just money.
All those people screaming fascism should consider what they would like to happen if, in the future, a flu strain emerges that has a high fatality rate. Public health is one of the things government is pretty good at, and I'd prefer to be required to have a vaccine than have my cubicle mate give me a preventable high-mortality disease.
All that said, and NY requiring health care workers to get the flu shot is a PR disaster. Health care workers should all get the flu shot, but in this particular case, it shouldn't be required because the push-back is likely to have more serious consequences than having a few people opt out.
I don't think that's ever going to happen. This country obsesses with sexual scandal the way only a puritan can. It'd be nice that actual important leaks were spotlighted (like KBR building deathtrap showers) than the latest Ensign/Edwards/Spitzer/Clinton/Craig affair.
Slashdot Mirror
*facepalm*
All what complications with the flu shot? Feeling queasy for an afternoon? Mild irritation at the injection site? Ok - don't get it if you're allegic to eggs. You're more likely to die from the flu outright than come down with the only major complication, Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Vaccines are one of the single greatest success stories of modern medicine. Our body is designed to fight off polio and smallpox too, but wasn't quite up to the task before vaccines.
If you or your aunt thinks getting vaccines is counter productive, you're morons.
I chuckled a little.
Imagine, government programs encouraging not only a gay military, but gay nascar, gay oil rig roughnecks, gay crab fishermen. (Next on Discovery follow the crew of the SS Judy Garland as they battle the elements on The Queerest Catch.)
How long would it be before the religious right was up in arms protesting that we're encouraging the youth to "turn gay" because we're steering them to all the honorable professions.
If it was enacted by the state legislature, and now it's going to a vote, isn't that a measure to repeal a law that's already on the books?
A quick google confirms that Washington currently offers extensive rights to gay couples with domestic partnerships. If this ballot measure fails to pass, those rights will be revoked.
How many people do you think there are that fully support marriage equality (or the right to a civil union as the case may be here,) but really think we should ask the voters if it should be taken away.
My guess - there's orders of magnitude more people who have no idea what they were signing.
Yeah that's true.
The general idea of the New Testement that Jesus set up a new more perfect covenant with humanity based mostly on the golden rule. Paul seemingly didn't quite learn the lesson with the lepers and the prostitutes and the tax collectors and the adulterers and the Samaritans and the whole do not pass judgment theme that runs pretty thick in the Gospels.
We still include his occasionally misogynistic and homophobic works because he, more than any other person including Jesus, was responsible for Christianity becoming a religion.
(1/3) Whether the gays came to her establishment or she set up a gay establishment is irrelevant. When the bulk of your business is selling stuff to gay people, you should think long and hard before biting the hand that feeds you. If you are convinced that your stand is honorable, accept your lumps. I do not condone harassment and threats should be taken seriously and investigated, but really, if her business were flourishing it wouldn't be an issue if she got some nasty phone calls. The real problem is that she's essentially out of work.
(2) Is bullshit, and even if it weren't and this were only about the semantics of the word marriage, you've still got a "separate but equal" problem.
(4)Churches have tax exempt status that is contingent on their separation from politics. To preach politics from the pulpit and still make use of the tax status is a violation of tax law.
(5) You have a right to free speech. Law enforcement has an obligation to investigate any crimes committed against regardless of any speech you've made. You do not have a right to not to be called names, picketed, or even shouted at or offended because people don't like your speech (right up to the legal limit of harassment.) If any of those legal forms of counter-speech intimidate or make you fearful, then you do not have the right to speak free of fear or intimidation. The only way for that to be so would be to infringe on the free speech rights of others.
actually, that's Saturday - and Jesus said it was ok to work - and I don't think the punishment is death.
Odd though how the sabbath can move, adulterers don't have to be stoned to death anymore, and I can have a ham and havarti sandwich, but the gay is still verboten...
I do not condone intimidation. However, if you're afraid of the consequences of your political views, you should keep them to yourself.
There's nothing tragic about the El Coyote story. A woman made her living off of catering to the gay crowd, then publicly supported a movement that succeed in stripping a civil right from her clients. Shockingly, he clientele decided to boycott.
Finally, the involvement of churches in this political arena is of questionable legality and homophobia has always been immoral.
Marriage is an important social institution.
Married families are more stable and one partner provides a safety net for the other in case of job loss of medical issues so that the state doesn't have to step in. This is equally true for same and opposite marriage. The government should provide incentives such as tax breaks to any two consenting adults who want to make a public commitment to each other.
this is not an unintended consequence.
Petitions have always been public, and sunshine laws let the public see public records.
The only unintended consequence is that some activists are unhappy that they're being associated with the movement they support.
The guiding principles of western democracies are Liberté, égalité, and fraternité.
You'll find no single source, because it's been in constant evolution, but starting with the magna carta and working through the great philosophers of the enlightenment (especially Voltaire) there's been an unmistakable movement from despotism (even the benevolent variety) to open public society and personal freedom. It's hard to argue that either the suppression of government petitions or the continued persecution of gays is in line with the rights and privileges of the western moral system.
Incidentally, that's why a "strict constructionist" judicial philosophy is really at odds with western values - we don't have sacred texts, we value constantly and continuing expanding personal freedoms.
In a democracy there are two ways to participate in politics. One is to exercise your right to vote in secret. The other is to publicly organize. A petition is not a vote, it's a public statement that "I support initiative X." As a public statement the speaker assumes the risks associated with speaking out in public - such as the possibility that your friends and neighbors will find out your opinions. Intimidation and harassment are illegal and these laws should be enforced, but petitions are public for a reason and should stay public regardless of whether or not some bad actors will do bad things. Participating publicly in politics is risky, which is why you're under no obligation to do so. If signature gathering efforts for ballot initiatives or to get a candidate on a ballot become private they risk becoming about as important as internet petitions and polls. When you sign a petition, you're literally putting your name on the line - which is what gives them the impact that they have - if it's anonymous and cannot be publicly verified no one will believe you when you say we have Y signatures. What's more these are most certainly not new tactics - the declaration of independence was essentially a petition, and the signatories certainly faced consequences for attaching their names to the document. Do you suppose that the declaration would be held in such high esteem had it been signed by BenLightning and SamTEHdrunk?
For an example of what you seek, research ring species
That's not quite right. We're less concerned with their reactors than we are with their enrichment facilities. In order for a reactor to create Pu-239, it can't look anything like a civilian power plant - you need a way of moving U-238 in and out of the core.
The reason we're not exactly clear on what Iran is doing or intends to do is because we haven't been let in to their covert enrichment facilities. We know their reactors are not well suited to the production of weapons grade plutonium, and we're monitoring them. We don't know exactly whether their enrichment facilities are capable of producing sufficient quantities of U-235 for weapons purposes because we haven't been allowed to monitor Qom yet to our satisfaction.
hey look - it's an coal lobbyist
There's no such thing as a 100% efficient scrubber. Emissions from coal plants are way down compared to the 70s, but we burn a lot of coal, so even a very high efficiency scrubber still lets a lot of pollutants through. And then there's China - who's emission standards aren't all that rigorous.
So once the scrubber is done taking the bulk of the pollutants out of the flue gasses, where does the contaminated water go? I'm not worried about mercury that's buried in a lump of coal in Pennsylvania, I am worried about mercury that goes from flue to scrubber to holding pond to water supply to salmon farm.
Oh, and incidentally, I'm more worried about 1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry somehow breaching containment than I am about the 20 ci of I-131 that was released from three mile island.
Then when you start considering CO2 as a pollutant (as SCOTUS has ordered the EPA to do) coal power starts looking very grim very fast.
But hey Pennsylvania is an politically important state, so as long as special interests run ads during election season promising vaporware "clean coal" I'm sure you have nothing to worry about - after all those EtOH ads in Iowa are working great too...
Your romanticization of violence sort of falls apart when you stop looking at flukes like Columbine where middle class disaffected teenagers have never experienced violence and start looking at the every day violence in the inner city. Kids don't get shot or stabbed downtown because they've been bottling it up too long.
shocking that there are impoverished and crime ridden minority areas in states that legally had sundown towns until 40 years ago...
Suburban sprawl is an economic effect - the fact that one ethnic group is wildly over represented can only be explained by racial causes. No one chooses to live in a ghetto, if only white people have the resources to get out - that's a racial problem.
p.s. California is number 43 receiving only 78 cents out of every dollar it sends to Washington.
linky
top 10 net recipients of federal tax money (dollars received per dollars contributed):
New Mexico $2.03
Mississippi $2.02
Alaska $1.84
Louisiana $1.78
West Virginia $1.76
North Dakota $1.68
Alabama $1.66
South Dakota $1.53
Kentucky $1.51
Virginia $1.51
The only southern states that contribute more than they recieve are Texas and Florida, at 94 and 97 cents on the dollar respectively. What this really means is that southern states are poorer than Northern States, which we've known since before there were two Carolinas... It also means that if rational self interest guided one's politics southerners would be screaming for higher federal tax rates - unfortunately that all ended with the civil rights movement and Nixon's southern strategy.
it depends on whether the negative mass occupies a negative or a positive volume.
Maybe, maybe not. This case in particular illustrates one way we can have plenty of warning - the disease was first spotted at the tail end of the flu season and we got to watch it develop in the southern hemisphere and learn A LOT between April and August. Had this flu strain proved to be particularly deadly, we would have known by July - and at that point the vaccine production was already well on its way. (obviously in the interim, a lot of people in the southern hemisphere would have died if the disease were particularly deadly, but that doesn't stop us from protecting our population - the same would be true in reverse if the disease had popped up in the northern hemisphere's summer or early fall.)
I'm not scoffing at the idea that hand washing and self-quarantine are effective measures, just pointing out that widespread vaccination resulting in herd immunity is more effective. There are somethings you can't control, sometimes you just get sneezed on. An effective and mandatory vaccination program can save a lot of lives - like it did and continues to do with measles.
There's only so much you can change human behavior. School children in particular will never be as hygienic as you may want them to be. Vaccination isn't a cure - it is a preventative measure.
well you're right about people over 52 possessing partial immunity. I'm not sure if there has been any analysis on whether the H1N1 vaccine provides any additional boost to immunity, but it may.
You're not twice as likely to catch the swine flu if you've gotten flu vaccines in previous years. There was an interesting study done in Canada that found increased incidence of H1N1 among those who received the seasonal flu shot this year. As is oft repeated on slashdot correlation is not causation. Additionally, no one else has been able to reproduce these findings - it could be a quirk of confidence intervals or just plain bad methodology. The canadian data isn't published and hasn't been released. The CDC has looked at their data and found no such connection, and neither has anyone else. one source
If you're not in a high risk group (pregnant, compromised immune system, obese, very young, health care worker etc.) it's a good idea to get the vaccine when it becomes available, but no one's going to make you. If you're in a high risk group it's a really good idea to get the shot, but still no one's going to make you - unless you're a health care worker in New York.
At this point the swine flu isn't very news worthy, with the exception that the media plays an important roll in public health announcements like, "the vaccine will be available soon." In April, when we first found out that there was a novel flu strain it was very news worthy.
Finally, I'm going to repeat what I thought was the most important point of my initial post. What should the government do if a high mortality rate disease breaks out for which a vaccine exists?
The RIAA goes after uploaders because it's easier, not because downloading is legal.
It's a bit of an open question as to who is making the copy in a upload/download arrangement, and it's pretty easy to argue either side. In order to prosecute downloaders the RIAA would essentially have to host copyright material, which they don't want to do because, first, it involves putting something they don't want copied on the web, and second, if they're hosting it, you can make a reasonable argument that what you downloaded was implicitly authorized.
I too am a skeptic, but the reason for the initial panic, which in retrospect was clearly overblown, is that unlike "normal" flu strains, no one has any immunity to this swine flu. When news first broke, we didn't know that the fatality rate would turn out to be similar to that of the seasonal flu, rather than the spanish flu epidemic. So at the very least there were more differences between the swine flu and seasonal flu than just money.
All those people screaming fascism should consider what they would like to happen if, in the future, a flu strain emerges that has a high fatality rate. Public health is one of the things government is pretty good at, and I'd prefer to be required to have a vaccine than have my cubicle mate give me a preventable high-mortality disease.
All that said, and NY requiring health care workers to get the flu shot is a PR disaster. Health care workers should all get the flu shot, but in this particular case, it shouldn't be required because the push-back is likely to have more serious consequences than having a few people opt out.
I don't think that's ever going to happen. This country obsesses with sexual scandal the way only a puritan can. It'd be nice that actual important leaks were spotlighted (like KBR building deathtrap showers) than the latest Ensign/Edwards/Spitzer/Clinton/Craig affair.