You make the mistake of listening to articles about scientific research instead of actually reading the research. Additionally, you make the mistake of thinking that one study == Truth. Especially in biology and medecine, with hugely complicated machines and enormous difficulty setting up good controls, a single study is almost meaningless.
Wait for studies to confirm others, wait for things to percolate through the scientific community, then start paying attention to it.
The main application for piping your phone through your car audio is that phone calls are clearer, and you get access to your audio books, music, or online newspapers that have an audio stream. In other words, making sure that your car system isn't obsolete 3 years after you buy it requires a tethering mechanism. And bluetooth is the simplest one out there.
Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.
There are a few of them that grew up exactly like that. They show little difference with the rest of the politicians. Why? Because if they got to their position, anyone can, and those who don't become part of the 1% are clearly just lazy moochers.
Being poor in the US is either a temporary embarrassment or proof of being a bad person. It's quite amazing how alive Calvinism is in the US.
Great! That means that Al-Qaeda is not about Islam and instead is just about some base for some people, right? The fact that they constantly talk about Islam, Mohammed, and infidels is just a coincidence.
No. If you want Truth, Philosophy is down the hall. Science is about collecting data, creating models of the world around us, and testing the models for usefulness and accuracy.
How is GMail necessary to the growth of the middle class? There's 1.3 billion people who can pick from any other email provider. Compared to creating an OS from scratch, creating and running an email service is trivial.
The bigger concern is that you may not be able to reach any users of the very popular (and state-supported) Chinese services. If you can't do business with people in China through Gmail (and corporate GMail is a significant portion of GMail), you will switch to a provider who does. Or Google figures out a workaround.
In other words, it's a real concern, but not one I would lose a tremendous amount of sleep over. I'd much rather worry about Chinese hackers absconding with my data than about the Great Firewall blocking my GMail.
Wrong. You said it yourself: radar technology is so sensitive that they have to dial it down, otherwise they're swamped by false positives. If a giant bomb-dropping machine traveling at Mach 2 can pretend to be a sparrow flying over some forest, it's already a win. So it's a huge positive when fighting someone even with that kind of technology. When fighting someone whose AA system is a guy holding an AK-47, it is 100% useless. Until we get to active camouflage.
Interesting. Just as a heads-up, HOAs are not all the same, and they're certainly not mandated by the state. They're mandated by developers, who love them due to the fact that they give them the ability to control the look of the development while they're still selling lots, all the while providing them with a lowered financial risk. In that sense, they're definitely not a normal free-association community: you want to buy that house, you join the HOA. Kinda like a union for rich people. Furthermore, they frequently end up being controlled by the people with the most free time: house wives whose kids have left the nest. And that leads to some ugly, ugly rules and enforcements.
What I always find fascinating is that the biggest libertarians invariably live in areas with very strong and expensive HOAs - if not outright gated communities.
Here's the thing: you don't live in your own universe. Where your activities impact and intersect with others, you need to come to agreements on how to behave with those others. Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=193060 Here's the link that states pretty clearly that the chicken pox vaccine is certainly not highly likely to actually cause Chicken Pox. It helps to read the actual literature.
Our reasoning is that the vacine is highly likely to actually cause a case of Chicken Pox, while it does not provide an actual immunity worth the term.
What? ahref=http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/vaccination.htmlrel=url2html-1107http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/...> 98% immunity is pretty fucking good. From the same link: "However, the risk of getting shingles from vaccine-strain VZV after chickenpox vaccination is much lower than getting shingles after natural infection with wild-type VZV. " As far as I can tell, you're wrong on pretty much all counts.
A democratic government isn't something separate from the population. The population gives legitimacy to the government through regular election. If you don't like the government, take it up with the population that elected it.
That said, this isn't even a case of tyranny of the majority. This is a case of the population codifying rules that are designed to prevent a few asshats from irreversibly harming many individuals and taxing society at large.
To put it in terms you understand: people got together and decided of their own accord that unvaccinated people present a massive and unwarranted risk to them, and they're setting up rules how the people who don't want to get vaccinated can interact with them. Furthermore, your personal freedoms end when they negatively impact my well-being.
Buildings don't decide anything, building owners do. The problem is that without building codes, building owners are incentivized to not make buildings earthquake safe: no one short of a civil engineer doing a tear-down analysis can figure out on their own if a building is earthquake-safe, which means that no one does, and everyone rolls the dice. Since earthquakes are rare, it's quite possible that the original builder will never be exposed to the results of shoddy building practices. However, it is guaranteed that someone will be. So we have a situation where the risk analysis is very difficult if not mandated ahead of time, the event is rare for a particular individual but guaranteed for a population, and the cost up-front for an individual is fairly large. The rational calculation for each individual builder is to not make it earthquake safe, and just claim it is ok. This shifts cost from individual builders onto the population at large.
Building codes are essentially the general population saying to individual builders "we made our risk-benefit analysis, and we're not going to subsidize you."
Shocking: building owners are supposed to pay others to maintain their buildings. What's the current world coming to? Wealthy owners should be able to have their work done for free, so that they can keep more of their hard-earned money.
The reason that the discussion isn't framed more to be about the safety of citizens is because it's assumed that people understand to have buildings not collapse in an earthquake is a generally good thing for everyone. Do you really have to have a discussion about how not having buildings collapse onto people inside them is a good thing or a bad thing? We even have some pretty good numbers of the costs associated with earthquakes, as they happen frequently enough in plenty of developed and undeveloped areas.
All they have to do is compile a list of buildings that the City deems to be unsafe, and the owners will be sufficiently encouraged to make the upgrades (or lose their present tenants.) No subsidies, no tax breaks, no cost to the city.
Ah yes, the magic of the free market. There's absolutely no cost associated with moving, and there is a ready supply of housing that offers everything that the unsafe housing does, minus the lack of earthquake readiness.
Folks: the U.S. government (or any part thereof) can't just march in and force property owners to change their property. Government has to compensate the owners for any taking of a property-owner's rights. If the City of L.A. wants to march in and say "you don't get to use your office building because it isn't earthquake-proof", then the City has to buy the property at fair market value.
Yes, because enforcing building codes constitutes a "taking". I'm sure you absolutely wouldn't do something like blame the government if buildings collapse in an earthquake due to lax building codes or lax enforcement.
The really sad part isn't that you actually believe this, it's that you're not the only one.
Slashdot Mirror
You make the mistake of listening to articles about scientific research instead of actually reading the research. Additionally, you make the mistake of thinking that one study == Truth. Especially in biology and medecine, with hugely complicated machines and enormous difficulty setting up good controls, a single study is almost meaningless.
Wait for studies to confirm others, wait for things to percolate through the scientific community, then start paying attention to it.
Oh - is that why all the posts about "SJWs are ruining Slashdot and the world" regularly sit at +5?
The main application for piping your phone through your car audio is that phone calls are clearer, and you get access to your audio books, music, or online newspapers that have an audio stream. In other words, making sure that your car system isn't obsolete 3 years after you buy it requires a tethering mechanism. And bluetooth is the simplest one out there.
Absolutely true. Unfortunately, it's far easier to convince management that the problem is the lack of a shiny tool that shows them pretty graphs than shitty data that they have to pay some consultant an ungodly amount of money to fix. Because, of course, no one in the company has the time to fix the data on which they run their business.
There are a few of them that grew up exactly like that. They show little difference with the rest of the politicians. Why? Because if they got to their position, anyone can, and those who don't become part of the 1% are clearly just lazy moochers.
Being poor in the US is either a temporary embarrassment or proof of being a bad person. It's quite amazing how alive Calvinism is in the US.
Great! That means that Al-Qaeda is not about Islam and instead is just about some base for some people, right? The fact that they constantly talk about Islam, Mohammed, and infidels is just a coincidence.
It's called an election. Not my fault that you can't convince enough people to vote for people who'll rewrite the Constitution.
No. If you want Truth, Philosophy is down the hall. Science is about collecting data, creating models of the world around us, and testing the models for usefulness and accuracy.
How is GMail necessary to the growth of the middle class? There's 1.3 billion people who can pick from any other email provider. Compared to creating an OS from scratch, creating and running an email service is trivial.
The bigger concern is that you may not be able to reach any users of the very popular (and state-supported) Chinese services. If you can't do business with people in China through Gmail (and corporate GMail is a significant portion of GMail), you will switch to a provider who does. Or Google figures out a workaround.
In other words, it's a real concern, but not one I would lose a tremendous amount of sleep over. I'd much rather worry about Chinese hackers absconding with my data than about the Great Firewall blocking my GMail.
Wrong. You said it yourself: radar technology is so sensitive that they have to dial it down, otherwise they're swamped by false positives. If a giant bomb-dropping machine traveling at Mach 2 can pretend to be a sparrow flying over some forest, it's already a win. So it's a huge positive when fighting someone even with that kind of technology. When fighting someone whose AA system is a guy holding an AK-47, it is 100% useless. Until we get to active camouflage.
Is that why the US almost leads the developed world in gun ownership, and blows it away in incarceration rates and gun deaths?
Well, I always like to point people to this incident as a great example of guns and rage really not mixing well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/michigan-concealed-carry-road-rage-two-dead_n_3956491.html
And it is still far, far more common than in any other western countries that do have strong gun control laws.
Interesting. Just as a heads-up, HOAs are not all the same, and they're certainly not mandated by the state. They're mandated by developers, who love them due to the fact that they give them the ability to control the look of the development while they're still selling lots, all the while providing them with a lowered financial risk. In that sense, they're definitely not a normal free-association community: you want to buy that house, you join the HOA. Kinda like a union for rich people. Furthermore, they frequently end up being controlled by the people with the most free time: house wives whose kids have left the nest. And that leads to some ugly, ugly rules and enforcements.
What I always find fascinating is that the biggest libertarians invariably live in areas with very strong and expensive HOAs - if not outright gated communities.
Here's the thing: you don't live in your own universe. Where your activities impact and intersect with others, you need to come to agreements on how to behave with those others. Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements.
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=193060 Here's the link that states pretty clearly that the chicken pox vaccine is certainly not highly likely to actually cause Chicken Pox. It helps to read the actual literature.
Our reasoning is that the vacine is highly likely to actually cause a case of Chicken Pox, while it does not provide an actual immunity worth the term.
What? ahref=http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/vaccination.htmlrel=url2html-1107http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/...> 98% immunity is pretty fucking good. From the same link: "However, the risk of getting shingles from vaccine-strain VZV after chickenpox vaccination is much lower than getting shingles after natural infection with wild-type VZV. " As far as I can tell, you're wrong on pretty much all counts.
The government, with a fund funded by vaccine makers.
If what you do with your body starts to affect my body, you better believe that I'll request a say in what you do with your body.
A democratic government isn't something separate from the population. The population gives legitimacy to the government through regular election. If you don't like the government, take it up with the population that elected it.
That said, this isn't even a case of tyranny of the majority. This is a case of the population codifying rules that are designed to prevent a few asshats from irreversibly harming many individuals and taxing society at large.
To put it in terms you understand: people got together and decided of their own accord that unvaccinated people present a massive and unwarranted risk to them, and they're setting up rules how the people who don't want to get vaccinated can interact with them. Furthermore, your personal freedoms end when they negatively impact my well-being.
Wow, new laws are being passed that impact people in new ways! Stop the presses, there's tyranny afoot!
Let me ask you this: why should everyone else subsidize building owners by footing the clean-up for their collapsed building?
Buildings don't decide anything, building owners do. The problem is that without building codes, building owners are incentivized to not make buildings earthquake safe: no one short of a civil engineer doing a tear-down analysis can figure out on their own if a building is earthquake-safe, which means that no one does, and everyone rolls the dice. Since earthquakes are rare, it's quite possible that the original builder will never be exposed to the results of shoddy building practices. However, it is guaranteed that someone will be. So we have a situation where the risk analysis is very difficult if not mandated ahead of time, the event is rare for a particular individual but guaranteed for a population, and the cost up-front for an individual is fairly large. The rational calculation for each individual builder is to not make it earthquake safe, and just claim it is ok. This shifts cost from individual builders onto the population at large.
Building codes are essentially the general population saying to individual builders "we made our risk-benefit analysis, and we're not going to subsidize you."
Shocking: building owners are supposed to pay others to maintain their buildings. What's the current world coming to? Wealthy owners should be able to have their work done for free, so that they can keep more of their hard-earned money.
The reason that the discussion isn't framed more to be about the safety of citizens is because it's assumed that people understand to have buildings not collapse in an earthquake is a generally good thing for everyone. Do you really have to have a discussion about how not having buildings collapse onto people inside them is a good thing or a bad thing? We even have some pretty good numbers of the costs associated with earthquakes, as they happen frequently enough in plenty of developed and undeveloped areas.
All they have to do is compile a list of buildings that the City deems to be unsafe, and the owners will be sufficiently encouraged to make the upgrades (or lose their present tenants.) No subsidies, no tax breaks, no cost to the city.
Ah yes, the magic of the free market. There's absolutely no cost associated with moving, and there is a ready supply of housing that offers everything that the unsafe housing does, minus the lack of earthquake readiness.
Folks: the U.S. government (or any part thereof) can't just march in and force property owners to change their property. Government has to compensate the owners for any taking of a property-owner's rights. If the City of L.A. wants to march in and say "you don't get to use your office building because it isn't earthquake-proof", then the City has to buy the property at fair market value.
Yes, because enforcing building codes constitutes a "taking". I'm sure you absolutely wouldn't do something like blame the government if buildings collapse in an earthquake due to lax building codes or lax enforcement.
The really sad part isn't that you actually believe this, it's that you're not the only one.