Then how do you explain all the times where there's an effect despite the test subjects being given no treatment? By definition the placebo effect is what we use to describe those instances where there is no treatment given, but the results are like that of a treated patient.
Yes, there presumably is some explanation possible, but at present, that's the best we can do.
There's a fair degree of hypocrisy there. Yes, I totally agree that it's foolish to pass up a perfectly good medical treatment or cure because of potential harm, but medical research tends to be of relatively low quality and usually contradictory. Yes, the conclusions are generally sound, but there are times when it would have been better off to take a alternative treatment than the medically approved of treatment. I think that Vioxx comes instantly to mind where it was worse than nothing.
But, for a good number of things there just isn't a particularly good way of drawing the line. Psychotropic medications are dubious in terms of science, but those are regularly prescribed my mainstream doctors, and peppermint used to be a common remedy for abdominal cramping which has fallen out of favor.
What's more, the placebo effect is a lot stronger than a lot of people realize. It can easily outweigh the results of some classes of treatment entirely.
As for Randi, I wish people would ignore him. I admire the goal, but despise the tactics he goes to. I've personally seen and done things which require explanation as the rational explanation doesn't work, but I've got no interest in going to him to see what's going on. I'm not interested in it.
Not really, you bring spending back in line by a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. The party that's knows that is coincidentally not the party that's promising to bring the government to its knees.
As for 2007 levels, are you fucking serious? We had massive spending during the 2001-2007 period and no tax increases to pay for it. Cutting spending to that level would be ridiculous as there was a ton of waste at that point. To get things to sane levels, we need to have a combination of tax cuts and tax increases.
Just because you have a lot of welfare states that don't want to accept cuts to their things, doesn't make it any more true. These politicians aren't promising cuts to bring things back under control, they're trying to get cuts to kill programs they don't like, even though their districts aren't actually contributint their fair shares and the spending that they are OK with is of no use to most people.
Considering that the GOP has promised specifically to burn the country down to make President Obama a 1 term President and that those politicians have all been reelected, I'd suggest that there is indeed a substantial number of voters that are in fact voting wrong.
If you really think the parties are identical, then you haven't been paying attention. Yes, on a few issues there is way too much agreement, but if you seriously can't see a difference on issues of taxation and social issues, you're one of those "low information voters" that I keep hearing about.
It's not a case where there's some debate, the GOP has been promising specifically to destroy the government.
We're talking about potential parolees. This isn't corruption, this is how the system is supposed to work. Variable sentences are variable dependent upon the parole board's view of whether or not a particular inmate is likely to re-offend. Makes sense, you don't really need to keep somebody behind bars for the rest of their life, if they don't re-offend and have paid their debt to society.
Parole boards prefer to to grant parole to somebody that's likely to go out and commit more crimes.
We have the power, it's just that when half of Americans vote for people promising to bring the government to the knees, you don't wind up with the best or the brightest being elected.
Which is strange, I would have thought voting for people looking to screw up the government would be just the ticket for effective and useful governance. Who'dathunk.
I wasn't really disagreeing, one of the wonderful thing about the '70s was that the processes being used are new enough to be rather impressive, but not so new that they've been ruined by overdoing it.
I tend to dislike the over production that goes on today, where rather than learning to make the music well, they fix it all in the studio, I love that the Eagles sound more or less the same on stage as they do in the studio, I can respect that, even if I dislike their vocals.
Fossilization of that sort has little to do with those milestones, it's just that at those points people tend to correlate to a drop in pressure to be open minded about new experiences.
For example, once one gets married, their partner will have a pretty substantial say in what activities they can try in the future and won't be likely to expose one to the broad range of ideas that a new girlfriend would.
And for people who don't move on to college, one isn't likely to be forced to be exposed to all the new music and such after one graduates high school.
So, there is probably something to it, but ultimately, it's most likely a byproduct of not pushing ones boundaries and comfort zone. I don't personally bother with new music lately, but that's largely a budgetary thing. Finding good indie music is easier than it was when I was in high school, but it's still a lot harder than finding Bieber.
The bigger issue I'm hearing with albums is where the mastering and or remastering isn't done very well. A lot of the really old jazz CDs which were essentially just a transfer with just enough processing to remove the snaps and pops, sound far better than a lot of the new stuff in terms of audio quality.
I'm personally skeptical about analog really sounding any different, but the mastering process is different, and a lot of the remastered stuff strips away at the CD's advantages.
Whether or not I'm a gun owner does not affect whether or not I might be murdered by a gun owner in the future. If you have some recommendations on making it so that gun owners can only kill each other, then the issue of who does and doesn't own a firearm would become relevant.
Also, for the love of god, learn how to aim, if you need 17 rounds, you're clearly not somebody whose gun skills are very good.
Can you explain to me where in the 2nd amendment it guarantees the right to have more than just 1 bullet in a magazine?
That's sort of the point, the 2nd amendment does not guarantee you the right to any number of bullets in a firearm, in fact it doesn't even say anything about firearms.
In other words, you don't actually care about making any progress on this front and are attaching impossible to fulfill conditions in order to permit you to pretend to be reasonable.
I'm all for personal privacy and freedom, but sometimes you do have to give up a little non-essential liberty in order to get real safety. And this is one of those times. Just requiring background checks makes it decidedly less convenient to buy firearms, if you're not legally allowed to have them, and gives that much more chance of people being caught before they've managed to amass an arsenal.
Compared with other methods of dealing with the problems, a background check is a minor annoyance.
Those crimes were 11 and 13 years ago respectively, meanwhile, it's been what, a few months since our last mass murder. Yes, I apparently misspoke, but only a RWNJ would consider a 11 year track record to not illustrate the point that firearm regulations don't work.
If somebody is so good of a shot that they're able to kill 10 people with 10 rounds, then clearly the government needs to do a better job of treating it's own special forces when they're let out of the service. More likely, you're looking at 2 maybe 3 casualties with 10 rounds, and a substantially smaller number than with the sizes that are legally permissible at the present.
Ah yes, and criminals will break the law, so no point in introducing any regulations. That line never gets old. Whether you care to admit it or not, these people get their weapons and gear from somebody. Either they buy it legally, as they do now, or they would have to try and get it past customs. Stealing doesn't work if people don't have them, and trying to get them past customs increases the risk that the authorities will figure it out.
Compared with the number of deaths from firearms in the US, the number of deaths from IEDs might as well be zero. There have been rather substantial attacks, but since regulations were put into place to track the people buying those chemicals, we haven't had another WTC bombing or Oklahoma City Bombing in the meantime.
The point is that firearms are largely unregulated, it's easy to legally buy firearms without a background check. Whereas with explosives, there are specific licensing requirements and the supply of the components is tracked and monitored much more closely. Yes, one can make ones own explosives, but a lot of those folks just blow themselves up as making them outside of industrial facilities with specific safety equipment is very risky. I know the chemistry involved and there's no way in hell I'd be doing that.
Considering the fact that it's the conservatives that are typically the most hostile towards the first amendment and hostile towards even modest firearm regulation, I would have to suggest that maybe firearms aren't what's protecting our first amendment rights.
Nobody is talking about gutting the second amendment. People are talking about mandating background checks whenever a firearm is transferred to a new owner. And magazines to be limited in the number of rounds that they can hold to a sane number. If you require more than 10 rounds in a magazine in order to get one of them to hit the target, you have absolutely no business operating a firearm.
Considering the blow back from even modest regulation, it's hard to take you morons seriously.
And if we took reasonable precautions like background checks and limited magazine size to no more than 10 rounds, it would greatly inconvenience people that want to do this.
Just because you're an idiot, doesn't make it any less reasonable to introduce moderate gun regulations. But, then again, the Australians banned people from owning guns privately who didn't have a reason, self defense wasn't an acceptable reason, and they haven't had a single mass murder in all those years.
The reality here is that doing nothing because criminals would just break the law is a really, really stupid policy. The more inconvenient it is to commit the crime, the more opportunities there are for law enforcement to discover the plot and the more likely it is that the plot will just crumble on it's own.
The flights I've been on, they would never let you wear head phones during that part of the flight as they would have no idea as to whether or not the device was in operation.
Also, while it's ideal to have all that stuff stowed, you're implication that it's completely pointless because they aren't doing it 100% is just plain ignorant.
But, Bush was responsible for appointing somebody that was completely inept to FEMA and failing to make any preparations before landfall. This isn't like an earthquake which strikes without any warning, we have various meteorologists and weather stations that track these sorts of things. The whole situation at the Superdome was completely unacceptable.
As was the days of supply shortages, FEMA should have been preparing for that in a much more thorough way before the hurricane struck.
This is ignorant hogwash. The reason why those devices are banned during take off and landing is because most crashes happen at those points in the flight. Sure, some do crash midway through, but those are rare. Electronic devices are a distraction and something that can become a projectile.
The real question is why they permit people to have other things out and open during those periods of flight.
They're divisible to a huge extent, the problem though is that the total that can come into existence is already known and they don't come into existence at an impartial party, they come into existence as somebody's property.
And because of the fixed maximum number that can exist and the known curve of when they're going to be hitting various percentages, there's a strong incentive to hold onto your BTC, if you have any, and hope that other people bid up the price you can get when you sell.
In other words, it probably looks fine on paper to people, but most of the activity seems to be speculative in nature rather than as a currency.
I think Mountain time or Central time would be the most likely, and probably have hours pushed back a bit. Seems like whenever I need to call in about something, they've closed at 4 EST.
It should be Pacific Time though, seeing as Hawaii tends to skew things quite a bit.
I don't know, but Nintendo thinks that having a touchscreen on the controller is a good thing, so there's presumably a market of people that think likewise.
Slashdot Mirror
Then how do you explain all the times where there's an effect despite the test subjects being given no treatment? By definition the placebo effect is what we use to describe those instances where there is no treatment given, but the results are like that of a treated patient.
Yes, there presumably is some explanation possible, but at present, that's the best we can do.
There's a fair degree of hypocrisy there. Yes, I totally agree that it's foolish to pass up a perfectly good medical treatment or cure because of potential harm, but medical research tends to be of relatively low quality and usually contradictory. Yes, the conclusions are generally sound, but there are times when it would have been better off to take a alternative treatment than the medically approved of treatment. I think that Vioxx comes instantly to mind where it was worse than nothing.
But, for a good number of things there just isn't a particularly good way of drawing the line. Psychotropic medications are dubious in terms of science, but those are regularly prescribed my mainstream doctors, and peppermint used to be a common remedy for abdominal cramping which has fallen out of favor.
What's more, the placebo effect is a lot stronger than a lot of people realize. It can easily outweigh the results of some classes of treatment entirely.
As for Randi, I wish people would ignore him. I admire the goal, but despise the tactics he goes to. I've personally seen and done things which require explanation as the rational explanation doesn't work, but I've got no interest in going to him to see what's going on. I'm not interested in it.
Not really, you bring spending back in line by a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. The party that's knows that is coincidentally not the party that's promising to bring the government to its knees.
As for 2007 levels, are you fucking serious? We had massive spending during the 2001-2007 period and no tax increases to pay for it. Cutting spending to that level would be ridiculous as there was a ton of waste at that point. To get things to sane levels, we need to have a combination of tax cuts and tax increases.
Just because you have a lot of welfare states that don't want to accept cuts to their things, doesn't make it any more true. These politicians aren't promising cuts to bring things back under control, they're trying to get cuts to kill programs they don't like, even though their districts aren't actually contributint their fair shares and the spending that they are OK with is of no use to most people.
Considering that the GOP has promised specifically to burn the country down to make President Obama a 1 term President and that those politicians have all been reelected, I'd suggest that there is indeed a substantial number of voters that are in fact voting wrong.
If you really think the parties are identical, then you haven't been paying attention. Yes, on a few issues there is way too much agreement, but if you seriously can't see a difference on issues of taxation and social issues, you're one of those "low information voters" that I keep hearing about.
It's not a case where there's some debate, the GOP has been promising specifically to destroy the government.
We're talking about potential parolees. This isn't corruption, this is how the system is supposed to work. Variable sentences are variable dependent upon the parole board's view of whether or not a particular inmate is likely to re-offend. Makes sense, you don't really need to keep somebody behind bars for the rest of their life, if they don't re-offend and have paid their debt to society.
Parole boards prefer to to grant parole to somebody that's likely to go out and commit more crimes.
We have the power, it's just that when half of Americans vote for people promising to bring the government to the knees, you don't wind up with the best or the brightest being elected.
Which is strange, I would have thought voting for people looking to screw up the government would be just the ticket for effective and useful governance. Who'dathunk.
I wasn't really disagreeing, one of the wonderful thing about the '70s was that the processes being used are new enough to be rather impressive, but not so new that they've been ruined by overdoing it.
I tend to dislike the over production that goes on today, where rather than learning to make the music well, they fix it all in the studio, I love that the Eagles sound more or less the same on stage as they do in the studio, I can respect that, even if I dislike their vocals.
Fossilization of that sort has little to do with those milestones, it's just that at those points people tend to correlate to a drop in pressure to be open minded about new experiences.
For example, once one gets married, their partner will have a pretty substantial say in what activities they can try in the future and won't be likely to expose one to the broad range of ideas that a new girlfriend would.
And for people who don't move on to college, one isn't likely to be forced to be exposed to all the new music and such after one graduates high school.
So, there is probably something to it, but ultimately, it's most likely a byproduct of not pushing ones boundaries and comfort zone. I don't personally bother with new music lately, but that's largely a budgetary thing. Finding good indie music is easier than it was when I was in high school, but it's still a lot harder than finding Bieber.
The bigger issue I'm hearing with albums is where the mastering and or remastering isn't done very well. A lot of the really old jazz CDs which were essentially just a transfer with just enough processing to remove the snaps and pops, sound far better than a lot of the new stuff in terms of audio quality.
I'm personally skeptical about analog really sounding any different, but the mastering process is different, and a lot of the remastered stuff strips away at the CD's advantages.
Whether or not I'm a gun owner does not affect whether or not I might be murdered by a gun owner in the future. If you have some recommendations on making it so that gun owners can only kill each other, then the issue of who does and doesn't own a firearm would become relevant.
Also, for the love of god, learn how to aim, if you need 17 rounds, you're clearly not somebody whose gun skills are very good.
Can you explain to me where in the 2nd amendment it guarantees the right to have more than just 1 bullet in a magazine?
That's sort of the point, the 2nd amendment does not guarantee you the right to any number of bullets in a firearm, in fact it doesn't even say anything about firearms.
In other words, you don't actually care about making any progress on this front and are attaching impossible to fulfill conditions in order to permit you to pretend to be reasonable.
I'm all for personal privacy and freedom, but sometimes you do have to give up a little non-essential liberty in order to get real safety. And this is one of those times. Just requiring background checks makes it decidedly less convenient to buy firearms, if you're not legally allowed to have them, and gives that much more chance of people being caught before they've managed to amass an arsenal.
Compared with other methods of dealing with the problems, a background check is a minor annoyance.
Those crimes were 11 and 13 years ago respectively, meanwhile, it's been what, a few months since our last mass murder. Yes, I apparently misspoke, but only a RWNJ would consider a 11 year track record to not illustrate the point that firearm regulations don't work.
Are you an idiot?
If somebody is so good of a shot that they're able to kill 10 people with 10 rounds, then clearly the government needs to do a better job of treating it's own special forces when they're let out of the service. More likely, you're looking at 2 maybe 3 casualties with 10 rounds, and a substantially smaller number than with the sizes that are legally permissible at the present.
Ah yes, and criminals will break the law, so no point in introducing any regulations. That line never gets old. Whether you care to admit it or not, these people get their weapons and gear from somebody. Either they buy it legally, as they do now, or they would have to try and get it past customs. Stealing doesn't work if people don't have them, and trying to get them past customs increases the risk that the authorities will figure it out.
Compared with the number of deaths from firearms in the US, the number of deaths from IEDs might as well be zero. There have been rather substantial attacks, but since regulations were put into place to track the people buying those chemicals, we haven't had another WTC bombing or Oklahoma City Bombing in the meantime.
The point is that firearms are largely unregulated, it's easy to legally buy firearms without a background check. Whereas with explosives, there are specific licensing requirements and the supply of the components is tracked and monitored much more closely. Yes, one can make ones own explosives, but a lot of those folks just blow themselves up as making them outside of industrial facilities with specific safety equipment is very risky. I know the chemistry involved and there's no way in hell I'd be doing that.
Considering the fact that it's the conservatives that are typically the most hostile towards the first amendment and hostile towards even modest firearm regulation, I would have to suggest that maybe firearms aren't what's protecting our first amendment rights.
Nobody is talking about gutting the second amendment. People are talking about mandating background checks whenever a firearm is transferred to a new owner. And magazines to be limited in the number of rounds that they can hold to a sane number. If you require more than 10 rounds in a magazine in order to get one of them to hit the target, you have absolutely no business operating a firearm.
Considering the blow back from even modest regulation, it's hard to take you morons seriously.
And if we took reasonable precautions like background checks and limited magazine size to no more than 10 rounds, it would greatly inconvenience people that want to do this.
Just because you're an idiot, doesn't make it any less reasonable to introduce moderate gun regulations. But, then again, the Australians banned people from owning guns privately who didn't have a reason, self defense wasn't an acceptable reason, and they haven't had a single mass murder in all those years.
The reality here is that doing nothing because criminals would just break the law is a really, really stupid policy. The more inconvenient it is to commit the crime, the more opportunities there are for law enforcement to discover the plot and the more likely it is that the plot will just crumble on it's own.
Not true, most people in those situations survive. Especially if you had the sense to choose an appropriate location in the plane.
The flights I've been on, they would never let you wear head phones during that part of the flight as they would have no idea as to whether or not the device was in operation.
Also, while it's ideal to have all that stuff stowed, you're implication that it's completely pointless because they aren't doing it 100% is just plain ignorant.
But, Bush was responsible for appointing somebody that was completely inept to FEMA and failing to make any preparations before landfall. This isn't like an earthquake which strikes without any warning, we have various meteorologists and weather stations that track these sorts of things. The whole situation at the Superdome was completely unacceptable.
As was the days of supply shortages, FEMA should have been preparing for that in a much more thorough way before the hurricane struck.
This is ignorant hogwash. The reason why those devices are banned during take off and landing is because most crashes happen at those points in the flight. Sure, some do crash midway through, but those are rare. Electronic devices are a distraction and something that can become a projectile.
The real question is why they permit people to have other things out and open during those periods of flight.
They're divisible to a huge extent, the problem though is that the total that can come into existence is already known and they don't come into existence at an impartial party, they come into existence as somebody's property.
And because of the fixed maximum number that can exist and the known curve of when they're going to be hitting various percentages, there's a strong incentive to hold onto your BTC, if you have any, and hope that other people bid up the price you can get when you sell.
In other words, it probably looks fine on paper to people, but most of the activity seems to be speculative in nature rather than as a currency.
I think Mountain time or Central time would be the most likely, and probably have hours pushed back a bit. Seems like whenever I need to call in about something, they've closed at 4 EST.
It should be Pacific Time though, seeing as Hawaii tends to skew things quite a bit.
I don't know, but Nintendo thinks that having a touchscreen on the controller is a good thing, so there's presumably a market of people that think likewise.