http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...

Of course, that goes for most indoor workers in general, from lack of direct sunlight. But it might be a bit more extreme for those working underground, who might be less likely to take lunch breaks up in the sunlight.

https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions.
    Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Like Alaska does with oil and gas royalties: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Otherwise it ends up being mostly another giveaway of monopoly to the wealthy who pay a small fraction of the true value ...

http://www.thecaseagainsthomew...
"Bavo to Bennett and Kalish for having the courage to say what many of us know to be true! By connecting the dots in new ways, they make a strong case against the value of homework. This book serves as an indispensable tool for parents who want to get serious about changing homework practices in their schools."

Grades are bad too:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teach...

As is compulsory schooling in general (which could be replaced by a basic income from birth so parents can hire tutors, pay for private school, go on trips, and/or homeschool/unschool):
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...

As someone pushing 50, programming since my teens, I have to agree with this, and maybe to generalize, older programmers should also pursue embedded systems jobs in such companies, since an older programmer probably has a lot of related experience working on constrained systems and dealing with low-level custom protocols and such. I did a job search starting in early 2011 after several years as a (part-time) stay-at-home dad (not good on a resume to most employers), while also doing a couple Android apps (not much sales), some paying programming projects for my wife's consulting work, various free and open source stuff (including Python, Java, JavaScript, and CouchDB/NoSQL), and a bunch of (unpaid) writing about technology and society. It took about nine months of looking to land a position after sending out 100+ resumes, working my way down from dream jobs (e.g. Willow Garage telecommuting) to just about anything as our finances dwindled. We've generally only worked for others when we ran out of cash and credit to fund our own free and open source stuff, and my wife's consulting work had hit a dry patch with the recession, and apps I wrote were not selling well, and making money of my writing somehow did not look promising. I thought about trying to make a go of selling software as a service, but it just seemed too risky.

It was a tough search given the Great Recession then. Ultimately I got a contracting job at a big ancient-by-internet-terms broadcaster supporting internally-developed broadcast infrastructure software that has been in use for over fifteen years. It is a sort of soft-real-time embedded system requiring extremely high reliability with possibly million dollar costs for seconds of downtime (like affecting commercials during sporting events). Unlike your father's example, adjusted for inflation, the pay is much less than I used to make in my early 30s doing Smalltalk (the hot technology then). But, I did not have to move for a contract as I did then, and I can work mostly from home, so that's a big perk as far as contracting jobs go. There is a significantly older developer than me on the overall project, plus a couple highly experienced managers older than me. In general, I'm very thankful for the job, and the people I work with are nice, and the work itself is challenging in an interesting way (if you like the puzzle of making sense of the work of dozens of programmers of various styles and levels of competency over more than a decade in multiple languages implementing a complex task).

I can see though that as a programmer I am slowing down in some areas (even if I have other strengths). As someone who has spent decades always being the best overall developer around, this is the first project I've been on that I've had to admit to myself there are better programmers on the team than me in many respects. That is a bit of a blow to my ego.

It's also the kind of position I probably would not have stayed in or done well in in my 20s or 30s, including because the emphasis is more on reliability than innovation. Reliability at first glance is boring, but it still has its own more subtle creative challenges both technically and socially, and there can still be a lot to learn and do. For example, ironically one of my big "value-added" efforts was getting people to agree to get rid of a somewhat-unreliable recently-added component to the system by helping find the root cause of the problem the additional complexity was supposed to fix (but ultimately didn't). When I was younger, I would have been more likely to have tried to get the extra complexity to work instead of spending months navigating the social and technical landscape needed to remove it. How do you measure "programmer productivity" when the end result is making a system more reliable by getting rid of an expensive piece of custom hardware and software which sounded like a good idea at the time? I'm inspired in this in part by Andy Hertzfeld's essay about Bill Atkinson and "-2000 Lines Of Code":
http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

BTW, a useful resource for those interested in developing reliable systems:
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://resources.sei.cmu.edu/l...

Sadly, I had to turn down another job offer that finally came in a couple days after I accepted the first but had not actually started yet with background checks etc.. Nine months of nothing and then two offers within days of each other. That work would have been doing open source work for state government and I really wanted do that kind of work. But it paid much less and would have entailed a total of three hours of daily commuting as a big time/money expense (bringing me after expenses probably just a bit above what I earned out of college adjusted for inflation). And even on that one they let slip that they had a tough time considering me because of my age.

With my interests in history and old technology (I'm a trustee of our local historical society), I find some enjoyment in thinking of the old broadcasting software in its context. It's sort of like restoring or maintaining an old classic car. You know it doesn't have, say, fuel injection, anti-lock brakes, or even seat belts, but it is still a classic with its own logic and special place in our hearts.

It looks like this company is about to finally retire the part of the software I've been helping maintain, replacing it with a generally better system other developers have been working on. I've suggested they send a copy of the older software to the Library of Congress to go with the rest of the company's archives there, but I don't know if they will. Whatever I might think about the internals of the software, or even the meaning of centralized broadcasting in a networked world, it's worked for a long time as software goes and affected many millions of people's lives (as one of the first major digital TV projects), and so I feel is of long-term historical interest and so worth preserving.

With that software's retirement, I may be soon looking for new work again (not sure, the life of a contractor). But at least I've got something current on my resume again to make it easier to find new stuff. Although perhaps ideally I should be somehow supporting my own applications. But having been interested so long in free and open source stuff, that's a harder business model to work with and pay a mortgage with. Not impossible perhaps, but harder. My wife's consulting is picking up again, so there are some opportunities there (but seemingly riskier ones).

In the past, my wife and I have only ever made significant money in the long-term by consulting. If we had both consulted all that we could as two programmers and put much of that money away, we'd be millionaires by now and could retire (the second professional income is what would have made that possible). But instead we chose to spend time on our own FOSS projects (my wife is finishing a free book right now). And homeschooling/unschooling a kid (and avoiding day care etc.) on top of that also is a huge opportunity cost financially. I can only hope overall that the world is a better place for the contributions that we and many millions of others with similar sentiments have made to the gift economy, whether through Debian GNU/Linux, Slashdot, Wikipedia, personal blogs, volunteering at zoos, or whatever.

Maybe someday we'll have a basic income so people who want to make free stuff will have the means to do so without so many compromises and delays. Or as I write about on my website, maybe the gift economy, 3D printing roboticized subsistence economy, and democratically planned economy will have become strong and effective enough to create more living options for those who might prefer to do other than exchange-based economic transactions. One thing I feel is quite likely: between AI, robotics, better designs, and voluntary social networks, the value of much human labor (young or old) is going to decrease significantly over the next couple of decades.

Good points on dreams, and disappointments, and continuing hopes.

Here are some rambles of my own thoughts and experiences with OLPC and an independent software developer long interested in education (my wife and I made a free garden simulator in the 1990s).

I got two OLPs via the G1-G1 program. One never even made it out of the box, sadly. (I think of donating them somewhere sometimes, thinking it is better a kid has it than it becomes an unused collector's item.) I made a demo version of some of our plant growth software under Sugar and ported to Python, but did not take it much further. The code is here:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

My hopes from 2007:
https://mail.python.org/piperm...

As I see it, the OLPC project shot itself int the foot unfortunately, especially with Sugar. (I've done that to myself enough times, so I know. :-) Sugar was a great idea, and still is, but it was just too much of a stretch and not especially central to the overall OLPC goal. The push to Sugar also just underestimated how fast kids can learn -- contrast with the Hole in The Wall project. As others have said, it would have been better to just get a plain Linux system running Debian and a standard window manager into kids' hands on a low-end ruggedized laptop. Sugar may have had innovative ideas, but it was a real stumbling block, Also not choosing ARM was another stumble. Dumbing down the browser was another stumble, Also promoting Python on low-end hardware was another stumble, as much as I've liked Python; Java or just C would have been a better choice. Or instead of Sugar, just all Squeak on Forth and ditching the OS would have at least been a more innovative plan and improved performance and understandability by ditching Linux. The keyboard also is a problem of usability and reliability. One of the USB ports on the machine we used stopped working quickly, and I can't see how they would really be waterproof anyway. Sugar was also a distraction form finding and organizing existing educational software and content, another stumble. (I know a separate foundation started to do free content for the OLPC, not sure where it went.) Not understanding that a village of often related people works together and could have a networked central facility (with one computer per child who wanted to use it, plus cheap usb storage fobs) is another cultural stumble. It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight the OLPC group should have know these things as with all after-the-fact comments, but I won't let them off that easily, because people did point such things out from the start, and also you'd expect the team to have some expertise in education and culture and system design. These point to some sort of dysfunctional social process that must have been going on with early decision making.

What it mostly came down to as far as my involvement was that as a developer, why should I make an educational app specific for Sugar to reach an audience of a million (or whatever), going up a painful bleeding edge learning curve dealing with buggy ever-changing Sugar infrastructure, when I can potentially reach an audience of a billion or more writing a JavaScript-powered web app or just a plain cross-platform Linux/Mac/Win app like with Java or C/C++ or even Squeak? And knowing Moore's law means whatever I write now of bigger platforms will be accessible more cheaply in five or ten years? Even as a volunteer, the value proposition is weak.

I wanted the OLPC project to succeed. I even used it as an example here, suggesting the world might be better off if Princeton University dissolved itself and spent the endowment on OLPCs:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...

Overall, though, just JavaScript/HTML/CSS in the web browser in many ways now realizes the constructivist vision of interactivity better than Sugar. The $250 Chromebook I write this on completes that idea (even if not quite rugged enough).

We bought an XO tablet a couple months ago just to see where OLPC things were going, and to support the software/content side of the effort, and it is not bad as far as a selection of pre-installed software. While not as rugged as OLPC in some way, smart phones and small tablets and Chromebooks are filling a low-end educational niche -- including used ones. I suggested that in 2009:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

BTW, my original suggestion of a similar idea in 2000, suggesting Arm, Linux/Squeak, mesh netowkring, and so on:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
"I'd love to make a souped up version of this for OHS/DKR use: (Read about in May 2000 Popular Mechanics) "Cybiko Introduces First Handheld Internet Wireless Entertainment System At Toy Fair 2000" ... Imagine what we could have for $1000 by the end of this year by integrating technology that already exists: ... And remember that in five years this entire thing will cost US$100 each. ... Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000 African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one shut down nuclear plant.) Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...) ... Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball). But luckily, there is hope from toymakers! "

Or actually, in the end, mostly the cell phone makers... And a big part of the smartphone's success is as a fancy toy. I just bought three cheap water-resistant Android phones (Kyocera "Hydro") for about $50 each, just to spur me to think about what connected app I could make for them. I made a web chat app on a cheap $250 MyBook Live server that is viewed from a browser (even though I know how to write Android apps, client-server conserves on battery). In that sense, the dream has been realized -- since the $50 Hydro with a web browser can probably meet many of the most essential original goals of the OLPC project and then some. Yes, you may need some wireless network in the village, but that is not that unreasonable, as you can get $100 wireless routers.

See also my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
----
About a book by Jeff Schmidt, a previous editor of Physics Today magazine:
        http://www.disciplined-minds.c...

"In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline"."
From Marcia Angell:
        http://www.nybooks.com/article...

"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
From the Atlantic from a few years ago:
        "The Kept University"
        http://www.theatlantic.com/pas...

"Commercially sponsored research is putting at risk the paramount value of higher education -- disinterested inquiry. Even more alarming, the authors argue, universities themselves are behaving more and more like for-profit companies..."
Also from the Atlantic, just recently:
        "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science"
        http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

"Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors -- to a striking extent -- still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science."
---

Or where US medicine began to go greatly wrong a century ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"When Flexner researched his report, "modern" medicine faced vigorous competition from several quarters, including osteopathic medicine, chiropractic medicine, electrotherapy, eclectic medicine, naturopathy and homeopathy.[11] Flexner clearly doubted the scientific validity of all forms of medicine other than that based on scientific research, deeming any approach to medicine that did not advocate the use of treatments such as vaccines to prevent and cure illness as tantamount to quackery and charlatanism. Medical schools that offered training in various disciplines including electromagnetic field therapy, phototherapy, eclectic medicine, physiomedicalism, naturopathy, and homeopathy, were told either to drop these courses from their curriculum or lose their accreditation and underwriting support. A few schools resisted for a time, but eventually all complied with the Report or shut their doors."

Article has been gutted somewhat like many Wikipedia medicine articles. It used to have stuff on how women and minorities had also been disenfranchised by that takeover, so that only rich white guys who could afford college could practice medicine.

Anyway, I may not agree 100% with all your points, and I don't think one has to go all the way to extremes or conspiracies to see many bad things in mainstream medicine that should be fixed, but there still is a lot of underlying truth about conflicts and confusion and profit motive and group think and cartels and monopolies and so on. See also:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.amazon.com/Survivin...
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...
http://www.naturalnews.com/040...\
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/AR...

Like so many things, a solid 20% of mainstream medicine is indeed miraculous (like trauma care for accident victims) -- but so much of the rest of mainstream medicine ignores the context of illness -- nutritional, social, cultural, employment, environmental, financial, etc... So it treats the symptoms or palliates the pain (more profitable) rather than cures or prevents (less profitable).

As you point to, mainstream medicine (and many mainstream institutions) ignore or downlplay or try to avoid accepting "Dark Nights of The Soul" which can be times of spiritual growth:
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nig...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
https://www.google.com/webhp#q...

http://edge.org/conversation/h...

which have helped with her own ASD kid (whether vaccines played a role or not): http://www.generationrescue.or...
"5. Explore an Allergen Free Diet
Improvement has been seen with the removal of certain allergens such as gluten, casein, or soy from the diet. Explore a variety of special diets, including the gluten-free, casein-free diet and other allergen free diets through the following resources:
Explore the the gluten-free, casein-free diet
Body ecology diet
Elimination diet
Rotation diet
Other allergen free diet
6. Consider Supplementation with multi-vitamins and other beneficial nutritional support
Multi-vitamins and multi-minerals
Probiotics
Digestive enzymes
Fish oils
MB12
Natural detoxifiers
Anti-virals
Anti-fungals
Anti-yeasts"

See also:
http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...

I agree with your point about conflict of interest, which I mention in other replies. Does look like US military personnel get little choice about orders to be vaccinated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://thinktwice.com/military...

The kind of studies you ask for in humans would generally be considered unethical. Even if ethical, they are expensive, and such results don't profit drug companies, so they are rare. So, in humans, we are left with small "gold standard" double-blind controlled studies and larger observational epidemiological studies. A lot of infectious disease were already greatly reduced through improved sanitation, handwashing, quarantine, and better nutrition and lifestyle/behavioral choices (such as not drinking from a common cup and bucket of water on a train as once was common) as well as some curative medicines (antibiotics, phage therapy, etc.) before vaccines came along.

However, I challenge you to supply the same sorts of studies you request for all the specific current formulations of vaccines currently in use today. If you look for such studies in animals, you may find at least some popular vaccines do not work as well as you might think. For example, consider:
http://news.sciencemag.org/hea...
"The current vaccine for whooping cough, or pertussis, may keep you or your baby healthy, but it may not stop either of you from spreading the disease, a new animal study suggests. Baboons can harbor and spread the disease even after receiving the vaccine, researchers have found. ... As expected, the unvaccinated baboons developed severe whooping cough, while the baboons that had been sick previously remained well, the research team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Both groups of vaccinated animals also remained healthy. However, the germ persisted an average of 35 days in the throats of baboons vaccinated with the acellular shot, though it grew less thickly than it did in the throats of the sick, unvaccinated animals. Baboons vaccinated with the whole-cell shot harbored the germ for 18 days, and it did not grow at all in animals that previously had recovered from pertussis."

Note that the baboons that actually had the disease did not pass it on, unlike those who had been vaccinated. Vaccine-based immunity fades fairly quickly for pertussis. It is possible that when people get whooping cough as older children or adults (when it is more manageable) and nursing mothers pass that immunity on to their infants, there may be less mortality among infants from the disease. One problem with many vaccines is that since they fade quickly, you need life-long booster shots, which for dozens of disease could add up potentially to thousands of shots over a lifetime -- each one with a risk of being a mis-manufactured "hot lot" or being mis-injected or being worthless because the disease evolved. Even if each shot may seem to make sense, the total cost for the individual and society of getting on the treadmill of artificial immunity may be quite high. For example, consider the lifetime burden of aluminum from 100 or so annual flu shots.

Of the related research easy to find on exercise and nutrition and disease transmission, here are a few of them:

http://www.ucdenver.edu/academ...
"Children with poor nutrition are at increased risk of pneumonia. In many tropical settings seasonal pneumonia epidemics occur during the rainy season, which is often a period of poor nutrition. We have investigated whether seasonal hunger may be a driver of seasonal pneumonia epidemics in children in the tropical setting of the Philippines. In individual level cohort analysis, infant size and growth were both associated with increased pneumonia admissions, consistent with findings from previous studies. A low weight for age z-score in early infancy was associated with an increased risk of pneumonia admission over the following 12 months (RR for infants in the lowest quartile of weight for age z-scores 1.28 [95% CI 1.08 to 1.51]). Poor growth in smaller than average infants was also associated with an increased risk of pneumonia (RR for those in the lowest quartile of growth in early infancy 1.31 [95%CI 1.02 to 1.68]). At a population level, we found that seasonal undernutrition preceded the seasonal increase in pneumonia and respiratory syncytial virus admissions by approximately 10 weeks (pairwise correlation at this lag was 20.41 [95%CI 20.53 to 20.27] for pneumonia admissions, and 20.63 [95%CI 20.72 to 20.51] for respiratory syncytial virus admissions). This lag appears biologically plausible. These results suggest that in addition to being an individual level risk factor for pneumonia, poor nutrition may act as a population level driver of seasonal pneumonia epidemics in the tropics. Further investigation of the seasonal level association, in particular the estimation of the expected lag between seasonal undernutrition and increased pneumonia incidence, is recommended."

Vitamin D deficiency may be a factor there as well, since people tend to stay indoors more during the rainy season.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
"Along with poor diet there is a large amount of infection and disease present in many developing communities. Infection is very draining on vitamin A reserves and this vitamin A deficit leaves the individual more susceptible to infection (Combs, 1991); increased documentation of xerophthalmia has been seen after an outbreak of measles and the varying stages of xerophthalmia become a good reference point for the extent of deficiency (with mortality increasing with severity of the eye disease). In a longitudinal study of preschool Indonesian children it was found that susceptibility to disease increased nine times when severe VAD was present (Dole 2009). The reason for the increased infection rate in vitamin A deficient populations is due to the T-killer cells which require retinoids to proliferate correctly (Athanassiades1981). Retinoic acid binds the promoter region of specific genes and so activates the transcription process and therefore cell replication (Baron 1981). A vitamin A deficient diet will have a very limited surplus of retinol and so cell proliferation and replication will be suppressed, contributing to a reduced number of T-cells and lymphocytes. Suppression of these will result in a lack of immune reaction if pathogens become present in the body and consequently a greater susceptibility to incubation of disease."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"Malnutrition, the immune system, and infectious diseases operate in a cyclical manner: infectious diseases have deleterious effects on nutritional status, and nutritional deficiencies can lower the strength of the immune system which affects the body's ability to resist infections.[12] Similarly, malnutrition of both macronutrients (such as protein and energy) and micronutrients (such as iron, zinc, and vitamins) increase susceptibility to HIV infections by interfering with the immune system and through other biological mechanisms. Depletion of macronutrients and micronutrients promotes viral replication that contributes to greater risks of HIV transmission from mother-to-child as well as those through sexual transmission.[13] Increased mother-to-child transmission is related to specific deficiencies in micronutrients such as vitamin A.[14][15] Further, anemia, a decrease in red the number of red blood cells, increases viral shedding in the birth canal, which also increases risk of mother-to-child transmission.[16] Without these vital nutrients, the body lacks the defense mechanisms to resist infections.[12]"

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
"Conclusion: Low 25(OH)D3 serum levels are associated with high levels of HBV replication in patients with CHB. This represents a major difference from chronic hepatitis C, where numerous previous studies have shown a lack of correlation between HCV viral load and vitamin D serum levels. Inverse seasonal fluctuations of 25(OH)D3 and HBV DNA serum levels are suggestive of a functional relationship between both variables."

Pro and con claims about sugar:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
"In the study, researchers at Loma Linda University gave volunteers 100 grams of sugar (20 teaspoons, roughly the amount in a liter of soda). The researchers then drew blood from the volunteers and mixed in some bacteria. They found that infection-fighting white blood cells from people who had just gorged on sugar gobbled up many fewer bacteria than those who had just fasted or eaten an unsweetened starch. But that's not evidence that would convince most doctors, says Aaron Glatt, an infectious-disease specialist who is president and chief executive officer of New Island Hospital in Bethpage, N.Y. Glatt says he has heard of the sugar theory, but as far as he knows, there are no studies showing people who eat a lot of sugar actually get more cases of colds and flu."

Of course, there are be "no studies" that show something because it is not a profitable area either financially or academically to be in. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

From 1951 on studies connecting sugar and polio -- would be interesting to redo those tests with modern methods:
http://www.mercola.com/article...
"Diet Prevents Polio, by Benjamin P. Sandler, M.D."

On exercise:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...
"Being physically fit has been found in many studies to improve immunity in general and vaccine response in particular. In one notable 2009 experiment, sedentary, older adults, a group whose immune systems typically respond weakly to the flu vaccine, began programs of either brisk walking or a balance and stretching routine. After 10 months, the walkers had significantly improved their aerobic fitness and, after receiving flu shots, displayed higher average influenza antibody counts 20 weeks after a flu vaccine than the group who had stretched.
    But that experiment involved almost a year of dedicated exercise training, a prospect that is daunting to some people and, in practical terms, not helpful for those who have entered this flu season unfit.
    So scientists have begun to wonder whether a single, well-calibrated bout of exercise might similarly strengthen the vaccine's potency.
    To find out, researchers at Iowa State University in Ames recently had young, healthy volunteers, most of them college students, head out for a moderately paced 90-minute jog or bike ride 15 minutes after receiving their flu shot. Other volunteers sat quietly for 90 minutes after their shot. Then the researchers checked for blood levels of influenza antibodies a month later.
    Those volunteers who had exercised after being inoculated, it turned out, exhibited "nearly double the antibody response" of the sedentary group, said Marian Kohut, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State who oversaw the study, which is being prepared for publication. They also had higher blood levels of certain immune system cells that help the body fight off infection."

If exercise boosts immune response to vaccines, it would stand to reason it will boost response to real disease, too.

Much of science involves making, refining, and testing models. As is said here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
"Transmission experiments are suitable for determining the effect of vaccination on horizontal transmission of infectious agents (11). The key parameter is the reproduction ratio, which is the expected number of secondary cases produced by a typical infected individual during its entire period of infectiousness in a completely susceptible population (12). The aim of vaccination is to reduce the reproduction ratio (R) to a level less than 1 (R 1, the epidemic might not stop and major outbreaks can occur"

My conjecture is that taken together, all the things I listed (eating well, avoiding junk food, getting enough vitamin D and iodine, good sleep, homeschooling, working from home, laughing, exercising, and so on -- even buying stuff online), taken together when done across a society (in a "BlueZones" way) these things would help keep R less than 1.0 for most infectious diseases. And these suggestions would do it in a way that in general promotes higher quality of life for robustly healthy individuals. If you are really interested in this field, maybe you will be the one to prove if to your own satisfaction? Its a bit cruel, but you could compare the spread of some disease in two colonies of rats -- one fed normal rat chow for a week and one fed only sugar water for a week.

Of course, perhaps the really interesting rat studies may tend to get de-funded and forgotten about?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
"Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can."[2]
    To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16-20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.
    The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway's first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper's publication initially attracted no response.[4] Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.[5]"

The war on drug users is far too profitable to some to be slowed by evidence. Likewise, most angioplasties are a scam:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Anyway, doctors used to say smoking was good for you too...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
"In the 1930s and 1940s, smoking became the norm for both men and women in the United States, and a majority of physicians smoked. At the same time, there was rising public anxiety about the health risks of cigarette smoking. One strategic response of tobacco companies was to devise advertising referring directly to physicians. As ad campaigns featuring physicians developed through the early 1950s, tobacco executives used the doctor image to assure the consumer that their respective brands were safe."

And those people who opposed smoking were hounded from their jobs:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/0...
"Also, in 1927, the New York Evening Graphic lets Dr. Shelton go because he will not co-operate with their advertisement policies and insists on running an anti-smoking article."

Hand washing by surgeons after doing autopsies and then delivering babies used to be thought to be an "ungentlemanly" idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Leaded gas was defended by industry for decades at a huge human cost we are still paying:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...

And so on. There is so much conflict-of-interest in medicine and industry connected to it that it is hard to know who to trust; for example:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-j...
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. (Marcia Angell)"

Sorry to hear about your co-worker's loss. Still: http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/dis...
"Until relatively recently, only a few caught whooping cough, with less than 150 cases being reported in children aged four and under during 2007. Since then cases had been climbing steadily, until the large outbreak outlined above, which affected countries across the world, including USA and Australia. As to why the 2012 outbreak occurred in this way, opinion at the time of writing is divided.
It is possible that the bacteria causing the infection has changed in some way. Conversely, the HPA has conjectured that years of tight control over whooping cough may have led to people's immune systems not being boosted by repeat infections in adulthood, therefore leaving the population as a whole at increased risk."

And also:
http://www.vaccinationcouncil....
"Prior to vaccination, infants were less susceptible to pertussis because real "herd immunity" was in place, and mothers were passing on immunity to their infants during the vulnerable time. Since vaccination, this herd immunity has actually been abolished, and infants are now more susceptible due to their vaccinated or non-immune mothers lacking specific antibody and cellular immunity for pertussis. This can be verified in the medical literature:
    "Diminishing maternal immunity increases the risk of infection among the youngest age groups, who have not yet received at least two doses of the vaccine."[3]
    When pertussis is left to take its normal course in the community, the supposedly vulnerable infants that the vaccinationists scream and yell about, are protected by maternal antibodies and mother's milk until they are old enough to process the disease on their own. After vaccines were introduced, this protection was vastly reduced, because the mothers were at best, having vaccine antibodies to pass along to their infants, and that defense is neither effective nor long-lasting. The reason for the diminishing maternal immunity is that vaccinated individuals tend to have lower antibody titers long-term, and breast milk antibody (IgA) is not transferred in vaccinated mothers. As we already know, two doses and even three doses of vaccine is far from a guarantee of immunity. In fact that is the exact reason there is a new vaccine in the pipeline to add to the current FAILED pertussis vaccine schedule. This new vaccine will be inhaled, and in this article [4] touting the need for the new vaccine, the authors detail the many problems with the current vaccine. ..."

It's too late to do anything for your co-worker's family, but to prevent such tragedies in the future to others, one might ask (rhetorically, not to the real person):
* was the child breastfed from birth?
* Was the mother vaccinated against pertussis and so had no natural immunity to pass on via breastmilk?
* did they have a home birth and avoid doctors offices and hospitals which spread disease?
* was the mother eating a great diet?
* did both mother and child get adequate sunlight or vitamin D?
* Did both get enough iodine?
* DId other vaccines like HepB at birth weaken the infant?
* DId compulsory work and compulsory schooling practices force the family to be exposed to more diseases (compared to a basic income and homeschooling/unschooling)?
* Did anyone in the family eat junk food, especially with a lot of sugar?
* Were family members getting enough sleep and exercise and laughter (all immune boosters)?
* And so on for other aspects of optimum health, like Dr. Joel Fuhrman talks about in "Disease-proof your Child":
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/...

If your co-worker was at all a typical US American, the answers to most of these questions would be unhealthy.

Your co-worker has experienced a great tragedy, which also affect everyone around him or her (including you). But to blame the entire tragedy on lack of vaccination ignores much deeper aspects of the issue -- including that ultimately vaccination may have played a role as above in reducing the effectiveness of breastfeeding in preventing the disease among infants. Vaccination can also give people a false sense of security about a disease given any disease can evolve over time (like the flu changes every year or so). The basics of good health (eat a lot of vegetables and fruits etc., avoid junk food, sleep well, exercise, laugh often, breastfeed infants from birth to age two years or more according to WHO, get enough sunlight or vitamin D and enough iodine, etc.) protect to some good extent against pretty much all communicable diseases. But instead of doctors spending a lot of time advising those, they put most of their time and energy into giving shots. Maybe that is all most doctors think they can do successfully (given busy impoverished stressed-out parents might ignore advice or could not afford it), but that points to a deeply dysfunctional health care system and the broader society around it.

Many people somehow seem to think or act like they can get some shots and then live an unhealthy lifestyle including eating junk all the time and not exercising etc. and they will be healthy and if they get sick they can just get more shots and take more drugs. As I've said elsewhere, if you want to make people who don't vaccinate suffer, why not do the same for people who eat junk food, who don't breastfeed infants, who don't exercise, who send kids to public school or day care where diseases are quickly transmitted, who don't work at home to avoid more disease transmission, who don't get adequate sleep, who don't get enough sunlight and vitamin D, who don't get enough iodine which enables cells to have a protective coating that resist infections, and so on? Is that the society you really want to live in? And are you yourself then (like most US Americans) part of the health problem when so broadly construed?

I don't know what the best approach is, but I feel we need to think more deeply about these health issues now that we know a lot more about the human body, nutrition, society, and the complex evolutionary dynamics of communicable disease.

Probably the highest usefulness-to-cost ratio of any computer I've purchased, given it only cost only about $250 and is so low maintenance and light weight (and relatively droppable).

I still like a recent MacBook Pro better though for the bigger screen and better keyboard (including backlit) and better trackpad, as well as the ability to run Eclipse and some other software etc.. But for many people, the extra $1000 or more would not be worth it.

I enjoy the Chromebook immensely more that a Win 8 laptop that has been very frustrating to use, which every time I turn it on nags me with updates and other notices and long reboot cycles and such and just endless clutter getting in the way of actually just using it -- all while not doing much to mitigate security risks from downloads the way a web browser can mitigate risks from loading a web page.

And in a few years, with improvements in web tools including native code compilation within sandboxed zones, the convenience factor of something like the Chromebook will continue to improve. Meanwhile, both Windows and Mac OS seem to be devolving into harder to use systems.

Maybe you should check again: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...
"Exercise not only helps your immune system fight off simple bacterial and viral infections, it decreases your chances of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, and cancer."

http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH...
""Nutrition plays an important part in maintaining immune function," explains George L. Blackburn, M.D., Ph.D., associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. "Insufficiency in one or more essential nutrients may prevent the immune system from functioning at its peak.""

People with weaker immune systems are more likely to contract diseases and have them for longer and so spread them around more.

So, again, now that you know this, why not lock up those who eat junk food and who don't exercise, or force them at gunpoint to eat vegetables and do push ups? Such people otherwise pose a health risk to everyone else. That is a fact based on what people at the NIH and Harvard have said.

The same for the other things I mentioned which all affect the immune system. See also:
http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-...

Many things make contracting and spreading disease more likely (poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep, lack of vitamin D, lack of iodine, lack of nursing, sending kids to public school, going into a shared workplace every day, etc.). Why do you call at least some of those "an individual choice that does not affect the well-being of others" when clearly they all increase the risk of disease transmission? All of these choices affect the well-being of those around us. What of the immuno-compromised child who is going to die because your kid spread around the flu contracted in part by vitamin D deficiency, too much sugar, and not enough exercise?

Also, the fact is, vaccinations at best only protect to some degree against catching specific disease. These other things protect against catching almost any disease whether there is a vaccine for it or not. If forcing people to get vaccinated against their will for the public good is a good idea, why not force people to do these other things too?

For example, since people who eat poorly have a greater risk of contracting almost any communicable illness and spreading it around, why allow people to pick what food they want to eat each day for example? Clearly a government appointed dietitian (backed by gun-wielding police) would do a better job of deciding what you should eat each day than you could and thus do a better job of protecting the public health against widespread illness, injury, and death, right? Likewise for those who do not exercise enough. Cops should force people to exercise at gunpoint if needed, right? No less than the NIH and Harvard provide the supporting evidence,

Not laughing enough also is bad for you immune system.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/heal...
"Negative thoughts manifest into chemical reactions that can affect your body by bringing more stress into your system and decreasing your immunity. In contrast, positive thoughts actually release neuropeptides that help fight stress and potentially more-serious illnesses."

So, people who do not laugh enough are a health risk to those around them. It would seem then that people thus have no constitutional right to be dour sour pusses, since that puts everyone around them at health risk. So, why not set up a police force who force people to laugh by watching funny websites? Or do laughter yoga? And otherwise incarcerate them if they don't comply?

Although, like anything, I guess that could go too far:
http://nypost.com/2013/03/06/l...
"There's no pursuit of happiness for this Long Island man -- local cops busted him for laughing too loudly in his own home."

Anyway, building on your approach, without a valid medical exemption, laughing and telling funny jokes regularly and eating right and getting enough sleep and exercise and homeschooling and working from home and so on should be compulsory. Parents who refuse to do that themselves and who fail to ensure their children to do so should be charged with child neglect and endangerment. If a child dies from an infection (whether their own or someone else's) they should be charged with felony manslaughter and the state should provide free resources for anyone injured by their actions to sue for wrongful death, pain and suffering, or any related injury in court.

Really makes you want to have a bunch of kids, right? Your kids will be so much healthier because all the other kids will be so much healthier. And, the USA will be a much happier and healthier place to live in general for everyone if we have the state aggressively enforce all these health regulations on everyone, right?

And people who don't agree, or who are ignorant of these facts, could be send to re-education camps until they understand these thing? Looks like we've already got some plans ready to go, so it should be straightforward to implement an expanded version of your concept?
"Leaked U.S. Army Document Outlines Plan For Re-Education Camps In America"
http://www.infowars.com/leaked...
"Once the detainees have been processed into the internment camp, the manual explains how they will be "indoctrinated," with a particular focus on targeting political dissidents, into expressing support for U.S. policies."

"Nothing you listed creates a severe public health threat."

Do you seriously believe this?

AC wrote: " Thank god for people like Julian Simon. http://www.wired.com/wired/arc... "

See also: http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...

Still, markets can fail due to unpriced externalities (like pollution or military costs of defending oil supply lines) or unaccounted-for systemic risks (like derivatives or programmed trading leading to market collapse). Example, from Greenspan:
"Greenspan Destroys Deregulation in 16 Seconds"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

So, there are limits to what unregulated markets alone can do.

The gift economy, the subsistence economy, and them democratically planned economy can all provide alternatives for times when the exchange economy fails.