How is that even a difficult question? If you have an average lifespan of ~30 years due to infectious disease, starvation, dehydration, hypo/hyperthermia, poisonous food, or being eaten by predators, how exactly would a really slow acting low risk/high impact disease like skin cancer "eradicate" us? I know that it's popular to join the "everything causes cancer!" bandwagon but it's really not that difficult to understand. It's still good to know that being in the sun is always a risk, however small. Vitamin D is easy to get from supplements so if you just don't *like* being in the sun, you have good reason to avoid it.
You are looking at it the wrong way. It's entirely possible that people allied to big oil would legitimately try and counter global warming as a way to stay in business. There is a real non-zero risk of fossil fuels becoming banned worldwide unless there's a solution to counteract it.
That said, I'm not sure that the study isn't bullshit, but just because people from big oil are attached, doesn't necessarily invalidate it.
A tip for others: TV shows are generally rated more generously than films. On IMDB for example, a film with a rating of 7 or higher is generally very good. For TV shows, I would say the same level of quality requires at least a rating of 8.
That's true. However it could also mean that in the meantime the people who suffer from the deficiency could use filter glasses to keep their sight until a permanent treatment is discovered. Assuming that their findings are correct and that blue light is the only culprit.
An internet outage for me means that I can't access the medical journals of my patients. If they say "oh, allergies? Yeah there was this antibiotic this one time, but I don't know which one" an internet outage is a dangerous thing indeed.
Said text also includes a suggestion at the end that in one of the cases where that government IS the middle man, costs are lower. I'm not American, so I don't really know what to compare it to, but unless that part is an outright lie, the text does indeed seem to suggest that a government payer is a *better* middleman.
That I can agree with, politics making a shitty job out of fixing a problem isn't news in any developed nation. When arguing the pros and cons of solutions though, misinformation and unsubstantiated scaremongering helps no one.
You "know people"? What about the tens of thousands(studies show 18k-45k depending on methodology, the 18k figure is from conservative estimates) of American citizens who die every year because they simply can't afford to take part in your health care system? I guess since you don't know them, they can fuck off and die?
What you call propaganda is simply truth. I'm a jr. doctor in Sweden and our (single payer) healthcare costs per capita are way less than the US (even though we rank way up there in costs). Sure, we do have long queues for some diagnostics, especially when the illness in question is not life threatening (such as back pain, which btw generally just gets better on its own in a few years, no treatment other than acetaminophen or some other mild painkiller required). That said, implying as others in these comments have that single payer systems skip cancer tests and other life threatening diagnostic tools is not only misleading, but often based on ignorance or plain lies. Doctors here have full authority to order any damn test we like, the life of the patient goes before all else, anyone telling you different has no clue.
In short, the us system of insurance is inefficient (poor people often can't pay for regular check ups which increase costs when they do have to go to the ER), expensive (find any list of healthcare spending per capita, then remember that you don't even cover all of your citizens) and finally just plain unethical (if you can't figure out why, you're a shitty human being).
Ps. We even have private health care in Sweden, it's just funded publicly. So spare me the "socialist commie" bullshit. And yes, arguing about this makes me mad, which doesn't happen often.
If they are reimbursing in full, how are they making a profit? The result is the same as if they had simply bought the coins at market value in the first place.
But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
As a medical student I can say that while common sense and gut feeling would seemingly agree with you, the science of how our bodies work does not. Bacteria do not have to be directly present in order to cause problems. As an example you can take blood types, which most people are familiar with (A, AB, O). The antibodies that you have against the surface proteins of red blood cells of the different types are actually antibodies that are created against gut bacteria. However, mechanisms exist in each of us such that we do not develop antibodies against proteins that exist on our own cell structures, thus hindering our immune system from attacking our own proteins and cells.
This system is not fail-safe however and many auto-immune - where the body attacks itself - diseases exist (the field of rheumatology especially deals with a lot of these diseases). In short, just because antibiotics may wipe out a particular strain of gut bacteria that is present, the effect of that gut bacteria may indeed persist through many diverse mechanisms (of which the above is only one example), some of which we don't yet fully understand, as hinted at by this paper.
I don't care either way, but the source is the Pew Research Center (which to my knowledge is a non-partisan research group), not thinkprogress.org. They say so literally in the first sentence of the article.
That said the article and poll are from 2007 and the percentage differences are rather small so I would take the conclusions with some grains of salt.
You're on to something, of course. However, my point was that things like these are way more complicated than what the title/summary suggests. You can't just take two articles that *seem* to contradict each other and conclude that the contradiction must be true. It is entirely possible (and I'd argue likely) that the problem is much more complicated than that.
In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.
Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.
A lot of countries already do as you suggest, Sweden included. However, from what I understand there's a problem in the US in that trains often load with double stacked containers, increasing the total height of trains. This makes it infeasible to electrify your rails due to the overhead wires needing to go too high up. In order to electrify, you would have to also switch out a lot of train cars.
Overall though, electric trains are cheaper and more powerful if the infrastructure is there and most concerns about track longevity that people had back in the 70s-80s have been largely dispelled. It's mostly just a matter of actually investing in the power lines (and of course the power grid).
To be fair, gasoline cars get terrible mileages at those speeds as well, although maybe not as terrible. On the other hand, I imagine electrics will have a massive advantage in city driving thanks to not needing gears and the perk of regenerative braking.
Depends on what you mean by quite stable. During the dinosaur eras temperatures were much hotter for millions of years. This tells me that there's not just a single equilibrium point possible, stable or not.
Monsanto's business practices notwithstanding, what exactly is so terrible about GMO foods?
Selective breeding has been a thing for millennia and that's messing about with DNA, although in an indirect way. Changing foods so as to get rid of traits that are detrimental and add/keep traits that are beneficial is bad, why, exactly? If your opposition is anything resembling "but we don't know that it's good/bad!" then that just means that GMO should be held to a stricter scientific rigour. All things considered, science knows very little about which foods are good/bad for you, including the so called natural foods so the "but we don't know!" can be used for anything you put in your mouth.
I've replied to gweihir above pointing out the fact that his link is a commentary about an older experiment which indeed seemed deeply flawed.
However, I've actually read the report released today (not the older arXiv article, but the sifferkoll.se pdf linked in today's summary) and it seems a hell of a lot more controlled and "hands off" with regards to Rossi's involvement than what's been stated about previous experiments.
Slashdot Mirror
How is that even a difficult question? If you have an average lifespan of ~30 years due to infectious disease, starvation, dehydration, hypo/hyperthermia, poisonous food, or being eaten by predators, how exactly would a really slow acting low risk/high impact disease like skin cancer "eradicate" us? I know that it's popular to join the "everything causes cancer!" bandwagon but it's really not that difficult to understand. It's still good to know that being in the sun is always a risk, however small. Vitamin D is easy to get from supplements so if you just don't *like* being in the sun, you have good reason to avoid it.
You are looking at it the wrong way. It's entirely possible that people allied to big oil would legitimately try and counter global warming as a way to stay in business. There is a real non-zero risk of fossil fuels becoming banned worldwide unless there's a solution to counteract it.
That said, I'm not sure that the study isn't bullshit, but just because people from big oil are attached, doesn't necessarily invalidate it.
A tip for others: TV shows are generally rated more generously than films. On IMDB for example, a film with a rating of 7 or higher is generally very good. For TV shows, I would say the same level of quality requires at least a rating of 8.
That's true. However it could also mean that in the meantime the people who suffer from the deficiency could use filter glasses to keep their sight until a permanent treatment is discovered. Assuming that their findings are correct and that blue light is the only culprit.
You are probably correct that it did earn you that, but on the other hand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
An internet outage for me means that I can't access the medical journals of my patients. If they say "oh, allergies? Yeah there was this antibiotic this one time, but I don't know which one" an internet outage is a dangerous thing indeed.
Said text also includes a suggestion at the end that in one of the cases where that government IS the middle man, costs are lower. I'm not American, so I don't really know what to compare it to, but unless that part is an outright lie, the text does indeed seem to suggest that a government payer is a *better* middleman.
Oops, meant to reply to kenh, not to myself.
That I can agree with, politics making a shitty job out of fixing a problem isn't news in any developed nation. When arguing the pros and cons of solutions though, misinformation and unsubstantiated scaremongering helps no one.
You "know people"? What about the tens of thousands(studies show 18k-45k depending on methodology, the 18k figure is from conservative estimates) of American citizens who die every year because they simply can't afford to take part in your health care system? I guess since you don't know them, they can fuck off and die?
What you call propaganda is simply truth.
I'm a jr. doctor in Sweden and our (single payer) healthcare costs per capita are way less than the US (even though we rank way up there in costs). Sure, we do have long queues for some diagnostics, especially when the illness in question is not life threatening (such as back pain, which btw generally just gets better on its own in a few years, no treatment other than acetaminophen or some other mild painkiller required). That said, implying as others in these comments have that single payer systems skip cancer tests and other life threatening diagnostic tools is not only misleading, but often based on ignorance or plain lies. Doctors here have full authority to order any damn test we like, the life of the patient goes before all else, anyone telling you different has no clue.
In short, the us system of insurance is inefficient (poor people often can't pay for regular check ups which increase costs when they do have to go to the ER), expensive (find any list of healthcare spending per capita, then remember that you don't even cover all of your citizens) and finally just plain unethical (if you can't figure out why, you're a shitty human being).
Ps. We even have private health care in Sweden, it's just funded publicly. So spare me the "socialist commie" bullshit. And yes, arguing about this makes me mad, which doesn't happen often.
Your linked video literally has multiple shots of power lines (1:24, 2:07, 2:15 and probably more as I only quickly skimmed through it). :P
If they are reimbursing in full, how are they making a profit? The result is the same as if they had simply bought the coins at market value in the first place.
If we're talking Orwell, I personally consider Animal Farm to be his superior work.
"Some animals are more equal than others".
But I don't think it is cause by bacteria, because there is no cure. If gut bacteria caused the disease, some people would be cured inadvertently when they take high doses of antibiotics for other reasons, and that doesn't happen.
As a medical student I can say that while common sense and gut feeling would seemingly agree with you, the science of how our bodies work does not. Bacteria do not have to be directly present in order to cause problems. As an example you can take blood types, which most people are familiar with (A, AB, O). The antibodies that you have against the surface proteins of red blood cells of the different types are actually antibodies that are created against gut bacteria. However, mechanisms exist in each of us such that we do not develop antibodies against proteins that exist on our own cell structures, thus hindering our immune system from attacking our own proteins and cells.
This system is not fail-safe however and many auto-immune - where the body attacks itself - diseases exist (the field of rheumatology especially deals with a lot of these diseases). In short, just because antibiotics may wipe out a particular strain of gut bacteria that is present, the effect of that gut bacteria may indeed persist through many diverse mechanisms (of which the above is only one example), some of which we don't yet fully understand, as hinted at by this paper.
I don't care either way, but the source is the Pew Research Center (which to my knowledge is a non-partisan research group), not thinkprogress.org. They say so literally in the first sentence of the article.
That said the article and poll are from 2007 and the percentage differences are rather small so I would take the conclusions with some grains of salt.
I'd say an even more apt 1984 comparison would be an Eastasian Ministry of Truth.
You're on to something, of course. However, my point was that things like these are way more complicated than what the title/summary suggests. You can't just take two articles that *seem* to contradict each other and conclude that the contradiction must be true. It is entirely possible (and I'd argue likely) that the problem is much more complicated than that.
In happiness charts, Denmark continues to score the highest while they also have the highest prescription rate of antidepressants in the world.
Not saying Denmark is some shining beacon of mental health but the problem is quite simply harder to diagnose than to correlate psychiatric drug prescriptions and mental health stats. More serious studies are definitely needed.
A lot of countries already do as you suggest, Sweden included. However, from what I understand there's a problem in the US in that trains often load with double stacked containers, increasing the total height of trains. This makes it infeasible to electrify your rails due to the overhead wires needing to go too high up. In order to electrify, you would have to also switch out a lot of train cars.
Overall though, electric trains are cheaper and more powerful if the infrastructure is there and most concerns about track longevity that people had back in the 70s-80s have been largely dispelled. It's mostly just a matter of actually investing in the power lines (and of course the power grid).
To be fair, gasoline cars get terrible mileages at those speeds as well, although maybe not as terrible. On the other hand, I imagine electrics will have a massive advantage in city driving thanks to not needing gears and the perk of regenerative braking.
Depends on what you mean by quite stable. During the dinosaur eras temperatures were much hotter for millions of years. This tells me that there's not just a single equilibrium point possible, stable or not.
Maybe they do! Maybe they also have cloaking. Who's to say they aren't probing Uranus right now?!
Monsanto's business practices notwithstanding, what exactly is so terrible about GMO foods?
Selective breeding has been a thing for millennia and that's messing about with DNA, although in an indirect way. Changing foods so as to get rid of traits that are detrimental and add/keep traits that are beneficial is bad, why, exactly? If your opposition is anything resembling "but we don't know that it's good/bad!" then that just means that GMO should be held to a stricter scientific rigour. All things considered, science knows very little about which foods are good/bad for you, including the so called natural foods so the "but we don't know!" can be used for anything you put in your mouth.
Why do we know this, exactly?
I've replied to gweihir above pointing out the fact that his link is a commentary about an older experiment which indeed seemed deeply flawed.
However, I've actually read the report released today (not the older arXiv article, but the sifferkoll.se pdf linked in today's summary) and it seems a hell of a lot more controlled and "hands off" with regards to Rossi's involvement than what's been stated about previous experiments.