Don't be so sure I'm not advocating anarchy. The Protestant movement was, fundamentally, anarchic: a decision that individuals didn't need intercessories, right? If we had an entire nation of people who lived like *I* believe the Bible says we should, it could be an anarchy of sorts, and function. I think.
I'm not sure there are absolute, transcendent values. But I'm also not sure there aren't. I do know that personal preference is a lousy substitute for ethics and morality, and at least historically it hasn't been successful as a system for personal or community decisions, unless the person in question is a king or something.
You remember being fifteen? It was, indeed, like sex had just been invented: compare to the awkward danger of the first airplanes or the first cars. I'm so glad I'm not fifteen anymore... but that's because I, too, am sanctimonious and patronizing.
(at least I'm not looking in a tree for a burrow owl. Burrow owls live in HOLES! in the GROUND! that's why they call them BURROW OWLS! yes I like your.sig.)
It *is* logical, in a way. See comments below. I expect that people will act like I would when presented with a situation, so I'm all, like, y'know, it's all good, dude. She, also, expects that people will act like she did when presented with situations, and that's a terrifying thought to her -- and, from having watched, it's pretty scary to me as well. Hence her current feelings.
The thing that I can't seem to get across to her is that her faith and devotion to church wouldn't be half as intense if she hadn't gone through all that -- it made her who she is. If she successfully prevented people from experiencing all that stuff there's a good chance they'd end up lukewarm all, like, y'know, it's all good, dude people, like me.
But really that just echoes the larger societal disconnect over education in general: is it better to know about temptation or not? And isn't that the whole point of the Eden story? The founding story of Christianity is that the temptation of the knowledge of good and evil is where all the problems started, and that's what she believes. I don't believe that. But I don't believe it because of my past experiences, which is exactly why she does believe it, so it's irreconciliable. She's doing what she believes is right, and I likewise, and neither of us can actually convince ourselves, much less each other, that we are actually Right, just that we are, for our own viewpoints, right.
See comment further down thread for further discussion. *I* don't think people should be able to tell other people what to do, because *I* think the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. However, there are people who have very good reasons to disagree with me.
There certainly are actions that require condemnation. I think it's logical, within my friend's intellectual framework and history, for her to condemn drugs, sex, alcohol, and the like. I've never been drunk, so I have no idea what alcohol's all about. She has a very good idea what it's about, so she probably has a lot better judgment on the subject than I do.
If she heard me call her a sanctimonious bastard, she'd probably agree, and tell me that I'm a naive, unrealistic idiot. And I'd agree with her.
I was eliding a lot in that summary. She was raised in a very conservative, sheltered home in a rural area. I was raised in a permissive (although Christian -- at least one of my parents has been teaching sunday school continuously since the '60's) household. It's simplistic to believe that this is all that drove us to our different approaches, but I really had nothing to rebel against when I was old enough to have the choice, and she did. I had several friends who were children of pastors, and *wow* did they tear things up when they got out on their own. And to be fair I had two friends who were children of pastors who never did *anything* out of line: they were unbelievably well-behaved kids. So it's not simple causality. But, in my own personal sampling, I've only known one person who came from a background like mine and ended up seriously stuck in the sex/drugs/alcohol rut, whereas I know six people from heavily sheltered backgrounds who went *crazy* when they hit college. And I know a lot more people from permissive backgrounds than from sheltered backgrounds. And, to track things forwards, the three people from the sheltered background->CRAAAAAAAZY transition I still know, are now all heavily into exactly what their parents were into: shelter and control.
See, this is the thing. I expect that if I had kids they'd be like me, and I'd probably be right. The two people I'm thinking of, both daughters of pastors, went off to college and spent the next four years trying to figure out how many things they could stick in which orifices at the same time, and now, they both think exactly the same thing I do: that their kids would be like them. So, it's perfectly rational for them to want to prevent that kind of behavior, which, I have to say, should be prevented coz it's potentially deadly, while it's perfectly rational for me to use the same line of reasoning to say that there's no need for laws or legislation of morality. We take the same assumptions, do the same logic, and come up with conflicting conclusions, because our histories are different.
When you're a 45 year old parent, you probably can convince yourself that looking for boobies is a mistake and that nobody should be looking and certainly nobody should be finding. That's what's wrong with middle-aged people. (And what's wrong with kids? That they're ALWAYS LOOKING FOR BOOBIES. It's a cyclic system.)
I did something similar: this website made on an amiga using VI. it looks best when viewed using the resolution and settings my computer uses. If you don't like it there are many other websites.
My website is not particularly popular, surprise surprise.
>I think the real issue with the 'older' audience is that they've forgotten these key periods in a young boy's life.
I disagree: I think most people remember *exactly* how they were when they were younger and, now that they're older and more mature, are appalled by their own behavior and want to prevent other people from making the mistakes they made. It's just like stage mothers. One of my best friends is a hardcore Christian who is against drugs, homosexuality, and sex before marriage. Know why? Because when we were in college together she was spending every weekend drunk and coked out of her skull, screwing other girls. I keep pointing out to her that she wouldn't be where she is now if she hadn't done those things -- in fact, if she hadn't she'd probably be more like me, raised low-key liberal Christian with no particular urge to bust loose during college, and now as an adult completely permissive towards other people's rights to do whatever they want and vaguely agnostic, rather than who she became: right-wing Christian woman. Needless to say, she does not agree with me at all, because she, like Jack Thompson, thinks she has the right to tell other people how to live their lives. Which is, fundamentally, what this is all about: people who don't think you should know or live what they know or have lived. Santimonious bastards.
For the record, cellulose IS sugar, it's just a polymerized version of it (as is glycogen in people, and starch in potatos.) However, not just everything can break down the cellulose polymer. Plants, bacteria, and some unicellular animals can, but not multicellular animals unless they have an intestinal system full of aforementioned unicellular beasties. If you're really curious here's a diagram of the structural difference between starch and cellulose.
I work slightly more low-end jobs than you, I think: severance pay hasn't ever been discussed. At two of my previous jobs, every friday everyone dreaded coming in because about 1/2 the time there was a manager and two large security guards standing at the door, waiting to tell the people who'd gotten laid off that they couldn't come into the building (even to clean out their lockers.) That was your notice.
A guy at my girlfriend's workplace quit, giving one day's notice. ("Tomorrow's my last day. Bye.") A bunch of the manager types were HIGHLY OFFENDED by such behavior, that he hadn't given them two weeks' notice. I was talking to one of them and said "I've never gotten two weeks' notice that I was getting fired, or laid off, and I know very few people that have." He didn't seem to see the two situations as being equivalent. It's a dated mindset, I guess, that employers have the power and employees are like machinery to be replaced. In fields where there's more demand than supply for talented technical people, market forces are alive and well.
since I have accounts on both: LJ, as a community, is more prone towards writing, and myspace more prone to graphics/video. If you can take hot pictures of yourself you're probably going to end up on myspace. If you can write well enough that people don't gag, you'll be more likely to do well on LJ. It's evolution: popularity whores will focus on the medium that gives them the greatest exposure. Myspace has tended towards visual, and LJ towards textual. It's also somewhat easier to use myspace's setup to code really godawful-looking flashy pages.
There's a somewhat depressing book called "Under The Banner Of Heaven" by Jon Krakauer, talking mostly about the history and context of the Mormons, but also talking about how easy it is for scammers to make headway in mormon communities because everyone trusts churchmembers. That's a fundamental part of human communities, and even computers working with game theory predict that in groups that repetitively interact, initial trust benefits the members of the group, which is why this scam works so well.
In case you don't want to go look at Wikipedia, azides are high-energy nitrogen-nitrogen bonds that are unstable, hard to make, and hard to handle. There are some (common) metals that can cause azides to form spontaneously combustible (aka hypergolic) compounds, which is a problem if your processing system contains impurities of that metal in the tubing or gaskets. In contrast, butadiene is a major industrial chemical used in making synthetic rubber, for which we have well-understood handling and manufacturing processes, and acrylates are also large-scale, moderately stable feedstocks for the plastics industry.
>Higher diabetes rates could well be explained by the large amounts of sugar in lots of food products in America. Even the bread was very sweet to my senses, let alone the rediculous amounts of soft drinks consumed( "would you like a refill for that half-a-litre of coke you just drained?" ).
Though the popular perception is that excess sugar is a cause of diabetes, research has shown much less correlation (and no causation at all) between sugar and adult-onset diabetes. Instead it's more likely genetics, exercise, and fat intake that seems to cause insulin resistance and subsequent problems.
I've had a different experience from you. The most recent example was my girlfriend's problems with endometriosis: we went to a very high-end fertility clinic because they were said to be good at such things and when it came time to pay, they said it'd be about $700 and asked for our insurance, and when we said we had none the woman said, sotto voice, "oh, well, how about $400?" and looked around to make sure nobody else in the waiting room had heard her.
Likewise, one of my best friends has a father who is a doctor and he figured out what sort of insurance claims had the highest repayments (profitability) so he went out of his way to find patients suffering from related problems so he could turn in what were, basically, inflated claims. (He got in a LOT of trouble for it, too.) But he, also, was charging what the market would bear -- more from insurance companies than from individuals.
Obviously, your experience is different, but I think there's a lot of variety, depending on the doctor and the situation.
I'm going about this in totally the wrong way. I just can't understand why people are opposed to the vaccine. What sort of things make you think it's a bad idea? Side-effects, known or unknown? A general feeling that we're overprotected?
Something like 20% of people who have had chickenpox have shingles later in life. Those aren't attractive odds. I'm not saying chickenpox vaccination is anywhere nearly as vital as polio or smallpox were, but now that they're mostly gone, and measles/mumps/rubella/tetanus/pertussis are vastly less common, why not work on what's left? Thus far I haven't seen any evidence for negative chickenpox vaccine side-effects (unlike polio, for instance, or to a lesser extent smallpox and measles) so I can't see any reason to *not* give routine chickenpox vaccinations. There's an upside, there's no downside (I may be wrong on that, but time will tell) so it seems like a no-brainer.
It's a moving goalpost. People said the same thing about smallpox: once you get it, you don't ever have to worry again, so why immunize? These days, chickenpox is the thing. Maybe in 50 years it'll be colds. The point is that it's a net good. Overall, more people suffer less because of a chickenpox vaccine.
Rimmer: "There are so many things we don't know about aliens! They could've helped built the Egyptian pyramids! After all, we have no idea how people could have built such huge pyramids." Lister: "They had whips. Massive, massive whips."
Microbiology, CSU, 90-95. We probably met. I stayed in FC until 2000.
I remember one of the epidemiology classes, maybe the one that Ian whosehistoes the guy with the british accent was teaching, they were talking about vectors and how the most recent anthrax cases in the US were from people who had purchased horse blankets made of ox or yak wool from SE Asia, that had spores in them. People don't think about where natural products have been, and what they might be bringing with them.
Hey now! Since I grew up in and around The Fort, I have to defend the honor of my hometown: Greeley's had more people die of the plague lately than FC! But yeah, it's all over colorado and new mexico.
There are probably four types of plague infections: bubonic, the traditional swollen armpits and groin, infection of the lymph system; pneumonic, the traditional coughing, quick-moving infection of the lungs; septicemic, what the previous two turn into when it invades the blood and kills you right quick; and probably a long-term chronic infection in prairie dogs. Almost anywhere you have a high prairie dog population, you'll find the plague. When you have a human population and a prairie dog population intermingled, cats go find dead prairie dogs and chew on them and get pneumonic plague, come home coughing, get taken into the vet, and die before the vet can figure out what's wrong with them, and then owners or the vet come down with it -- and oftentimes die before other health providers can figure out what's wrong with THEM. The last death in Greeley was a vet just as above. One of my friends came out from New Hampshire or somewhere like that and I took him out hiking and he saw one of the signs on a fence around a prairie dog colony beside Horsetooth Lake, that said, "keep out: plague danger" and he freaked. He was all "plague? What plague? Like you mean *the* plague?" He got on a plane the next day and hasn't ever come back to visit.
>We can't be potential sacrifices for the greater good.
Yeah, you say that, and so does your neighbor, and the guy across the street, and thirty thousand other people.
*I* have to be a potential sacrifice to the greater good by obeying the speed limit, even though I know I can drive faster than it sometimes. What makes you so special?
Children, especially very young ones, seem to handle high temperatures much better than adults, maybe because they're still growing and can route around nerve damage. I'm not saying it's good for them, but it won't decimate them like it would an adult.
As for the chickenpox thing -- well, I'm sure 70 years ago people were saying "kids are SUPPOSED to get measles and whooping cough, aren't they? Now, POLIO vaccine: that makes sense." Every generation has its own triumph over childhood disease. Just ask someone who has had shingles how much a chickenpox vaccine is worth. Priceless, will be the reply.
In general, the side-effects of vaccines seem to negatively affect something like 1/50,000 children, whereas the side-effects of the diseases they're preventing affect more like 1/2000 children. That's massively simplifying, but childhood diseases were responsible for a lot of deaths, heart damage, brain damage, blindness, and other generalized awfulness that widespread vaccination has made us forget about. (I'm getting those side-effect numbers from some virology and microbiology textbooks; I don't have a web resource handy to back them up: sorry.)
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Don't be so sure I'm not advocating anarchy. The Protestant movement was, fundamentally, anarchic: a decision that individuals didn't need intercessories, right? If we had an entire nation of people who lived like *I* believe the Bible says we should, it could be an anarchy of sorts, and function. I think.
I'm not sure there are absolute, transcendent values. But I'm also not sure there aren't. I do know that personal preference is a lousy substitute for ethics and morality, and at least historically it hasn't been successful as a system for personal or community decisions, unless the person in question is a king or something.
You remember being fifteen? It was, indeed, like sex had just been invented: compare to the awkward danger of the first airplanes or the first cars. I'm so glad I'm not fifteen anymore... but that's because I, too, am sanctimonious and patronizing.
.sig.)
(at least I'm not looking in a tree for a burrow owl. Burrow owls live in HOLES! in the GROUND! that's why they call them BURROW OWLS! yes I like your
It *is* logical, in a way. See comments below. I expect that people will act like I would when presented with a situation, so I'm all, like, y'know, it's all good, dude. She, also, expects that people will act like she did when presented with situations, and that's a terrifying thought to her -- and, from having watched, it's pretty scary to me as well. Hence her current feelings.
The thing that I can't seem to get across to her is that her faith and devotion to church wouldn't be half as intense if she hadn't gone through all that -- it made her who she is. If she successfully prevented people from experiencing all that stuff there's a good chance they'd end up lukewarm all, like, y'know, it's all good, dude people, like me.
But really that just echoes the larger societal disconnect over education in general: is it better to know about temptation or not? And isn't that the whole point of the Eden story? The founding story of Christianity is that the temptation of the knowledge of good and evil is where all the problems started, and that's what she believes. I don't believe that. But I don't believe it because of my past experiences, which is exactly why she does believe it, so it's irreconciliable. She's doing what she believes is right, and I likewise, and neither of us can actually convince ourselves, much less each other, that we are actually Right, just that we are, for our own viewpoints, right.
See comment further down thread for further discussion. *I* don't think people should be able to tell other people what to do, because *I* think the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. However, there are people who have very good reasons to disagree with me.
There certainly are actions that require condemnation. I think it's logical, within my friend's intellectual framework and history, for her to condemn drugs, sex, alcohol, and the like. I've never been drunk, so I have no idea what alcohol's all about. She has a very good idea what it's about, so she probably has a lot better judgment on the subject than I do.
If she heard me call her a sanctimonious bastard, she'd probably agree, and tell me that I'm a naive, unrealistic idiot. And I'd agree with her.
I was eliding a lot in that summary. She was raised in a very conservative, sheltered home in a rural area. I was raised in a permissive (although Christian -- at least one of my parents has been teaching sunday school continuously since the '60's) household. It's simplistic to believe that this is all that drove us to our different approaches, but I really had nothing to rebel against when I was old enough to have the choice, and she did. I had several friends who were children of pastors, and *wow* did they tear things up when they got out on their own. And to be fair I had two friends who were children of pastors who never did *anything* out of line: they were unbelievably well-behaved kids. So it's not simple causality. But, in my own personal sampling, I've only known one person who came from a background like mine and ended up seriously stuck in the sex/drugs/alcohol rut, whereas I know six people from heavily sheltered backgrounds who went *crazy* when they hit college. And I know a lot more people from permissive backgrounds than from sheltered backgrounds. And, to track things forwards, the three people from the sheltered background->CRAAAAAAAZY transition I still know, are now all heavily into exactly what their parents were into: shelter and control.
See, this is the thing. I expect that if I had kids they'd be like me, and I'd probably be right. The two people I'm thinking of, both daughters of pastors, went off to college and spent the next four years trying to figure out how many things they could stick in which orifices at the same time, and now, they both think exactly the same thing I do: that their kids would be like them. So, it's perfectly rational for them to want to prevent that kind of behavior, which, I have to say, should be prevented coz it's potentially deadly, while it's perfectly rational for me to use the same line of reasoning to say that there's no need for laws or legislation of morality. We take the same assumptions, do the same logic, and come up with conflicting conclusions, because our histories are different.
Oh, she was a lot of fun when she was 24. Imagine a half-irish, half-hispanic gymnast.
Now, she's still a great friend, but she's also right-wing-Christian woman, and all married up and against drugs and sex and stuff.
When you're a 45 year old parent, you probably can convince yourself that looking for boobies is a mistake and that nobody should be looking and certainly nobody should be finding. That's what's wrong with middle-aged people. (And what's wrong with kids? That they're ALWAYS LOOKING FOR BOOBIES. It's a cyclic system.)
I did something similar: this website made on an amiga using VI. it looks best when viewed using the resolution and settings my computer uses. If you don't like it there are many other websites.
My website is not particularly popular, surprise surprise.
>I think the real issue with the 'older' audience is that they've forgotten these key periods in a young boy's life.
I disagree: I think most people remember *exactly* how they were when they were younger and, now that they're older and more mature, are appalled by their own behavior and want to prevent other people from making the mistakes they made. It's just like stage mothers. One of my best friends is a hardcore Christian who is against drugs, homosexuality, and sex before marriage. Know why? Because when we were in college together she was spending every weekend drunk and coked out of her skull, screwing other girls. I keep pointing out to her that she wouldn't be where she is now if she hadn't done those things -- in fact, if she hadn't she'd probably be more like me, raised low-key liberal Christian with no particular urge to bust loose during college, and now as an adult completely permissive towards other people's rights to do whatever they want and vaguely agnostic, rather than who she became: right-wing Christian woman. Needless to say, she does not agree with me at all, because she, like Jack Thompson, thinks she has the right to tell other people how to live their lives. Which is, fundamentally, what this is all about: people who don't think you should know or live what they know or have lived. Santimonious bastards.
For the record, cellulose IS sugar, it's just a polymerized version of it (as is glycogen in people, and starch in potatos.) However, not just everything can break down the cellulose polymer. Plants, bacteria, and some unicellular animals can, but not multicellular animals unless they have an intestinal system full of aforementioned unicellular beasties. If you're really curious here's a diagram of the structural difference between starch and cellulose.
I work slightly more low-end jobs than you, I think: severance pay hasn't ever been discussed. At two of my previous jobs, every friday everyone dreaded coming in because about 1/2 the time there was a manager and two large security guards standing at the door, waiting to tell the people who'd gotten laid off that they couldn't come into the building (even to clean out their lockers.) That was your notice.
A guy at my girlfriend's workplace quit, giving one day's notice. ("Tomorrow's my last day. Bye.") A bunch of the manager types were HIGHLY OFFENDED by such behavior, that he hadn't given them two weeks' notice. I was talking to one of them and said "I've never gotten two weeks' notice that I was getting fired, or laid off, and I know very few people that have." He didn't seem to see the two situations as being equivalent. It's a dated mindset, I guess, that employers have the power and employees are like machinery to be replaced. In fields where there's more demand than supply for talented technical people, market forces are alive and well.
since I have accounts on both: LJ, as a community, is more prone towards writing, and myspace more prone to graphics/video. If you can take hot pictures of yourself you're probably going to end up on myspace. If you can write well enough that people don't gag, you'll be more likely to do well on LJ. It's evolution: popularity whores will focus on the medium that gives them the greatest exposure. Myspace has tended towards visual, and LJ towards textual. It's also somewhat easier to use myspace's setup to code really godawful-looking flashy pages.
There's a somewhat depressing book called "Under The Banner Of Heaven" by Jon Krakauer, talking mostly about the history and context of the Mormons, but also talking about how easy it is for scammers to make headway in mormon communities because everyone trusts churchmembers. That's a fundamental part of human communities, and even computers working with game theory predict that in groups that repetitively interact, initial trust benefits the members of the group, which is why this scam works so well.
In case you don't want to go look at Wikipedia, azides are high-energy nitrogen-nitrogen bonds that are unstable, hard to make, and hard to handle. There are some (common) metals that can cause azides to form spontaneously combustible (aka hypergolic) compounds, which is a problem if your processing system contains impurities of that metal in the tubing or gaskets.
In contrast, butadiene is a major industrial chemical used in making synthetic rubber, for which we have well-understood handling and manufacturing processes, and acrylates are also large-scale, moderately stable feedstocks for the plastics industry.
Though the popular perception is that excess sugar is a cause of diabetes, research has shown much less correlation (and no causation at all) between sugar and adult-onset diabetes. Instead it's more likely genetics, exercise, and fat intake that seems to cause insulin resistance and subsequent problems.
I've had a different experience from you. The most recent example was my girlfriend's problems with endometriosis: we went to a very high-end fertility clinic because they were said to be good at such things and when it came time to pay, they said it'd be about $700 and asked for our insurance, and when we said we had none the woman said, sotto voice, "oh, well, how about $400?" and looked around to make sure nobody else in the waiting room had heard her.
Likewise, one of my best friends has a father who is a doctor and he figured out what sort of insurance claims had the highest repayments (profitability) so he went out of his way to find patients suffering from related problems so he could turn in what were, basically, inflated claims. (He got in a LOT of trouble for it, too.) But he, also, was charging what the market would bear -- more from insurance companies than from individuals.
Obviously, your experience is different, but I think there's a lot of variety, depending on the doctor and the situation.
I'm going about this in totally the wrong way. I just can't understand why people are opposed to the vaccine. What sort of things make you think it's a bad idea? Side-effects, known or unknown? A general feeling that we're overprotected?
Something like 20% of people who have had chickenpox have shingles later in life. Those aren't attractive odds. I'm not saying chickenpox vaccination is anywhere nearly as vital as polio or smallpox were, but now that they're mostly gone, and measles/mumps/rubella/tetanus/pertussis are vastly less common, why not work on what's left? Thus far I haven't seen any evidence for negative chickenpox vaccine side-effects (unlike polio, for instance, or to a lesser extent smallpox and measles) so I can't see any reason to *not* give routine chickenpox vaccinations. There's an upside, there's no downside (I may be wrong on that, but time will tell) so it seems like a no-brainer.
By the way, it was my understanding that shingles is the return of chickenpox that has remained in the body since a childhood infection, and it can return multiple times. While I'm at it, some of the complications from shingles include deafness, blindness, and facial paralysis. I'd really really like to not experience that.
Rimmer: "There are so many things we don't know about aliens! They could've helped built the Egyptian pyramids! After all, we have no idea how people could have built such huge pyramids."
Lister: "They had whips. Massive, massive whips."
Microbiology, CSU, 90-95. We probably met. I stayed in FC until 2000.
I remember one of the epidemiology classes, maybe the one that Ian whosehistoes the guy with the british accent was teaching, they were talking about vectors and how the most recent anthrax cases in the US were from people who had purchased horse blankets made of ox or yak wool from SE Asia, that had spores in them. People don't think about where natural products have been, and what they might be bringing with them.
Hey now! Since I grew up in and around The Fort, I have to defend the honor of my hometown: Greeley's had more people die of the plague lately than FC! But yeah, it's all over colorado and new mexico.
There are probably four types of plague infections: bubonic, the traditional swollen armpits and groin, infection of the lymph system; pneumonic, the traditional coughing, quick-moving infection of the lungs; septicemic, what the previous two turn into when it invades the blood and kills you right quick; and probably a long-term chronic infection in prairie dogs. Almost anywhere you have a high prairie dog population, you'll find the plague. When you have a human population and a prairie dog population intermingled, cats go find dead prairie dogs and chew on them and get pneumonic plague, come home coughing, get taken into the vet, and die before the vet can figure out what's wrong with them, and then owners or the vet come down with it -- and oftentimes die before other health providers can figure out what's wrong with THEM. The last death in Greeley was a vet just as above. One of my friends came out from New Hampshire or somewhere like that and I took him out hiking and he saw one of the signs on a fence around a prairie dog colony beside Horsetooth Lake, that said, "keep out: plague danger" and he freaked. He was all "plague? What plague? Like you mean *the* plague?" He got on a plane the next day and hasn't ever come back to visit.
>We can't be potential sacrifices for the greater good.
Yeah, you say that, and so does your neighbor, and the guy across the street, and thirty thousand other people.
*I* have to be a potential sacrifice to the greater good by obeying the speed limit, even though I know I can drive faster than it sometimes. What makes you so special?
Children, especially very young ones, seem to handle high temperatures much better than adults, maybe because they're still growing and can route around nerve damage. I'm not saying it's good for them, but it won't decimate them like it would an adult.
As for the chickenpox thing -- well, I'm sure 70 years ago people were saying "kids are SUPPOSED to get measles and whooping cough, aren't they? Now, POLIO vaccine: that makes sense." Every generation has its own triumph over childhood disease. Just ask someone who has had shingles how much a chickenpox vaccine is worth. Priceless, will be the reply.
In general, the side-effects of vaccines seem to negatively affect something like 1/50,000 children, whereas the side-effects of the diseases they're preventing affect more like 1/2000 children. That's massively simplifying, but childhood diseases were responsible for a lot of deaths, heart damage, brain damage, blindness, and other generalized awfulness that widespread vaccination has made us forget about. (I'm getting those side-effect numbers from some virology and microbiology textbooks; I don't have a web resource handy to back them up: sorry.)