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  1. Re:But but but.. on Dr. Frances Kelsey, Who Saved American Babies From Thalidomide, Dies At 101 · · Score: 2

    The reason I would have gone to Walmart is they would be the only ones open at midnight when the one kid had an allergic reaction.

    And stores that sell sugar water are comiting fraud it has nothing to do with regation. Businesses that tend to defraud their customers don't stay in business long unless they have a state granted monopoly,

  2. Re:This is a great look at incentives for bureaucr on Dr. Frances Kelsey, Who Saved American Babies From Thalidomide, Dies At 101 · · Score: 1

    If there are hundreds of ways please give a few examples.

  3. Re:But but but.. on Dr. Frances Kelsey, Who Saved American Babies From Thalidomide, Dies At 101 · · Score: 1

    You act like there is no cost to these regulations both in financial and human suffering. How many people live in excruciating pain or end up killing themselves because they can get cheap and effective opiates? How many people don't get the medicine they need because doctors have gave themselves a monopoly as the gatekeepers of effective medicine? I am luck I am relatively wealthy. I had two kids this week that had allergic reactions. From past knowledge and a bit of googling and I knew they needed a course of steroids that cost about $4 for each kid. But I had to go to a doctor for each one and pay the copay and insurance to let them help my kid. So a night of suffering waiting for the doctors to get to work or spend 5 hours in an ER and that associated risk and cost as opposed to going to Walmart and picking up the prednisone.

  4. This is a great look at incentives for bureaucrats on Dr. Frances Kelsey, Who Saved American Babies From Thalidomide, Dies At 101 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is why bureaucracy is so dangerous. You are declared a hero if you stop something bad and are declared a failure if you let something bad happen. But if something is beneficial it doesn't matter if you let it go to market or not. The millions that suffer and die because of delays to get products to market are invisible. No stories are written about them and you are never blamed.

    With those incentives it's easy to see why the bureaucrat must delay things as long as possible.

    Take the OP quote of how the government ensures a healthy economy. We all know that's a complete joke. After 2008 what was needed was for the poorly run companies to go bankrupt and be bought by the well run companies. But that is risky from a bureaucratuv position. The status quo is preferable. So instead you take money from the well run companies and you give it to the poorly run ones as a bailout and everything is fixed right? Well right up until the house of cards falls again.

  5. Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience on Twilight of the Bomb · · Score: 1

    And that was worth 200k innocent lives.

  6. Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience on Twilight of the Bomb · · Score: 1

    Everyone is forgetting the Japanese were ready to surrender just not unconditionally. That was the sticking point. They had a few demands like leaving the emporer in place, which we did anyway.

    Also we should't forget it was Lincoln that ended the centuries long tradition of only targeting military.

  7. Re:Not NIMBY: other factors on Giving Up Alternating Current · · Score: 1

    That used to be true but not for modern plants. Here is one close to me and it puts out mostly steam and CO2.

    http://www.ouc.com/environment...

  8. Why animals can't be given human rights. on NY Judge Rules Research Chimps Are Not 'Legal Persons' · · Score: 1

    Humans have a right to life. If I see someone getting attacked on the street by a human predator I have the right to act in defense of the person being attacked up to and including killing the attacker. If we give animals the same rights then logically anyone can act in defense of prey animals by killing predatory animals. This would lead to ecological disaster. Also the logical conclusion would be that the dentist that killed that lion would be a hero for all of the prey animal lives he saved.

  9. Re:Embarrassment on UK Campaign Wants 18-Year-Olds To Be Able To Delete Embarrassing Online Past · · Score: 1

    But we X'ers are the meh generation.

  10. Re:Embarrassment on UK Campaign Wants 18-Year-Olds To Be Able To Delete Embarrassing Online Past · · Score: 1

    This will end once the boomers die off. Everyone has an embarrassing past. The problem is the Boomers that like to pretend their past was clean since there is no evidence and are quick to judge others. Once you can look up the HR persons trips to Cancun or your Boss's "experimental" stage we will all be on an even playing field.

  11. Living with Autism is easy on Interviews: Dr. Temple Grandin Answers Your Questions · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Living in an irrational society full of people that can't mind their own business is the hard part.

  12. Re:Profits are important to allocate resources on How Drug Companies Seek To Exploit Rare DNA Mutations · · Score: 1

    The market is very good at sorting these things out. Plenty of people buy snake oil. Look at the vitamin/supplement market. Most of that is unproven but people take it anyway. If you have a new drug the reason you will still do trials is because of marketing. Companies send their stuff to UL for testing so they can get the UL Label. You can still have the FDA running trails but instead of banning sales of drugs they just give their seal of approval.

    If you are risk adverse you may just stay will older more well proven drugs. If you accept risk or are desperate enough you may try more unproven ones.

  13. Re:Profits are important to allocate resources on How Drug Companies Seek To Exploit Rare DNA Mutations · · Score: 1

    I was talking about a free market where drug developers and patients were free to deal with each other without regulation. In such a case if patients would normally try more established drugs first and if they did not get results they would work through newer and potentially more risky drugs as they determined by their own risk tolerance. No reason someone couldn't pay for drugs undergoing early development.

    Also the effect of drugs is very individual. If you tried to get peanut butter through clinical trials you would most likely not notice some people are deathly allergic until larger late trials.

  14. It's called the free market on Giving Doctors Grades Has Backfired · · Score: 1

    Central Planners will never learn. There is no way to objectively measure these things because everyone's standards are different. I know people that are perfectly happy (and surprisingly healthy) visiting all sorts of quacks like chiropractors and acupuncturists.

    People have different values for every aspect of these things which is why you just need a free market in medicine.

  15. Profits are important to allocate resources on How Drug Companies Seek To Exploit Rare DNA Mutations · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't have a problem with the Pharmaceutical companies trying to maximize profits. Profits are necessary to help the market determine how to allocate resources. When a company makes "obscene" profits that is a signal to everyone else that resources should be taken from those enterprises incurring loses and invested in the more profitable ventures.

    But patents have nothing to do with a free market. They are a state granted monopoly that need to be eliminated. Get rid of patents and you will have quicker and smaller innovations as companies try to stay ahead in their market.

  16. Re:Transparency on Elon Musk: Faulty Strut May Have Led To Falcon 9 Launch Failure · · Score: 1

    That is why you use Statistical Process Control. I used to build assembly equipment and many tolerances were controlled by statistics. For eample say you had a certain diameter on a part that needed to be within tolerances. The first thing you do is take data on random parts to make sure all you have are random variations. If there is anything non-random you need to fix it. Then you set your control limits such that your process with your required degree of certainty is within it. So if you need the part to be from .998 to 1.001 you make sure your 3 sigma values are from .999 to 1.000. That way you can take random samples and make sure your process is in control in the limits. If your process degrades over time and you fall outside of those limits you are still making good parts you just know you need to replace tooling or perform maintainence to get the process back in control

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  17. Re:This is a direct consequence of Afirmative Acti on Silicon Valley Still Wrestling With Diversity Issues · · Score: 1

    So it's better they aren't hired at all?

  18. This is a direct consequence of Afirmative Action on Silicon Valley Still Wrestling With Diversity Issues · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you set up a system where you can be sued for firing people if they belong to a certain group why be surprised when they are not hired in the first place? Let's say women from a particular college were likely to accuse you of rape if you broke up. How many dates would they get?

    The same thing here. You need to be 100% sure you are picking the perfect protected employee because it will cost you plenty to fire them. Nobody is going to give someone a chance to prove themselves because it's too risky.

    Get rid of these stupid laws and you could easily hire 100 kids out of less well known schools and keep the 5 or 10 best.

  19. Re:About the latter news story... on UK Government Proposes 10-Year Copyright Infringement Jail Term · · Score: 1

    It was also used many times in the North when people were accused of harboring or helping fugitive slaves. The juries would refuse to convict.

    Since we now have several million non-violent people rotting in prison maybe we should start using it again?

    I think the real reason is the prison industrial complex doesn't like to be questioned. There is a lot of money at stake keeping those millions locked up.

  20. Re:About the latter news story... on UK Government Proposes 10-Year Copyright Infringement Jail Term · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure about the UK but in the U.S. juries are kept mostly in the dark by the judge.

    I was on a jury where the judge was the same one on the Zimmerman trial. In this case it wasn't clear what happened because every witness contradicted each other. The defendant seemed to claim self defense as in she said the other woman tried to hit her so she punched her in the face which left a bruise. The other woman claimed out of the blue the other woman hit her with an 18 in wrench. The defense attorney never made the self defense case which led me to believe the judge prevented him from doing so.

    Being a troll in general when we were in deliberation I sent a note to the judge asking for a copy of Florida's law in self defense.(that was Zimmerman's claim). She called us back in and read the same exact jury instructions she read before.

    It took me a while to talk the other jurors out of Assault with a weapon (since no weapon was ever found). I could not get them to understand there was reasonable doubt that the defendant was using self defense since the lawyer never argued it. They kept saying the judge told us to follow these instructions.

  21. Why not make self replicating plastic harvesters? on Plastic Roads Sound Like a Crazy Idea, Maybe Aren't · · Score: 1

    That way the just go collect the plastic and make more of themselves until the ocean is clean.

    Of course we may run into the Slylandro problem.
    http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Probe

  22. Re:Feels weird agreeing with scientologists on Scientology Group Urged Veto of Mental Health Bill · · Score: 1

    You missed the important part. Detain for 4 hours " allowing law enforcement to arrive and evaluate the situation."

    Whenever you use force you need to look at the unintended consequences. With a law like this people that might need help could stay away for fear of being detained while the doctors call the police.

  23. The Solution is Subsidiarity on America's Technical Debt · · Score: 2

    If you are going to have democracy then you need to push things to the lowest level possible. Instead of 50% + 1 winning it needs to be more like 2 sigma or 95%. If you want to delegate a function to the national government then 95%+ of the people should agree. Same for the state, county, town, neighborhood, family, or individual. The system we have now insures conflict because you can force a slight majority to your will.

  24. Re:another win for the 1% on Hillary Clinton Takes Aim At 'Gig Economy' · · Score: 1

    The problem is as follows. Employees like every producer want to have very few competitors, be able to charge a high price, and have steady predicable income. But as consumers we want the opposite. We want lots of choices, low prices, and be able to change the provider of our goods and services at whim. These are directly opposed.

    If your policies favor the former you will get a market with a few, expensive, and slow changing products and services. If you favor the latter you will have a market with plenty of cheap and ever evolving products to meet consumers demands.

    The goal of all lobbyists is to favor the former for their particular company or industry while favoring the latter for the rest of the economy.

  25. How times have changed. on Bomb Squad Searches House Over Teenager's Chemistry Experiments · · Score: 4, Interesting

    when I was about 12 in the mid 80's I rode my bike 10 miles to Radio Shack and bought all of the Mercury Switches they had (4?) for about $1.50 each. I built people detectors which consisted of a copper tube with batteries, Mercury switch, on/off push button, and siren. When we played hide and seek or paintball I could arm one and put a string across a path. If someone hit the string the siren would go off.

    I lost one or so I thought. A kid found one and took it home. His Mom called the cops because she thought it was a bomb. The kid ratted me out as the builder. The cop showed up at my house and asked me to come look at something. I followed him and one of these devices was in the street. I told the cop what it was and he laughed and told me to pick it up and take it home.

    I can't imagine what would happen today.