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Comment Re:There is no vaccine for the worst diseases (Score 3, Insightful) 1051

The risk is perceived as far higher than it really is, but that's human nature so it will have to be dealt with in a human manner.

I don't think humans are wired to intuit high-risk, high-reward probability spaces very well. There's the lottery, and then this vaccination thing, too (ignoring a few pertinent facets of it, obviously).

Imagine the following game: you roll 2d10 to determine what happens to you. On a roll of...

2-5) You are instantly murdered.
6-95) You receive $100 and are free to go.
96-100) You receive a million bucks and are free to go.

Do you play the game?

Comment Re:How about criminal charges ... (Score 1) 515

Or they just learn that not getting reelected is the price of getting into office in the first place because people have a variety of different issues that are "okay, you're out of here" offenses. In which case they just accomplish everything they want to in that one term and say fuck campaigning for reelection.

Say what you will about our election system, but the possibility of getting reelected keeps a lot of politicians from doing crazy stuff their first term. If everybody only had one term, the volume of crazy would rise dramatically because they have no reason to keep the voters mollified short of a recall.

I like the theory of "then vote their sorry asses out" but have come to the conclusion that the reason we still have a lot of these problems is that they really can't be solved without large, damaging changes to the entire system (we're basically trying to legislate to force people to stop being assholes).

Comment Re:2% is nothing (Score 1) 121

Ah crap. Got deer in the headlights for "Non-Defense Discretionary" since it had "Defense" in the title :P

Okay, so my original point is invalid. That doesn't change the fact that we spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, and a number of countries in Europe also tax their populations a hell of a lot more heavily so by % they may spend more on welfare stuff.

Comment Re:the evils of Political Correctness (Score 1) 201

Sure, I'd agree that nurture has a much bigger impact than nature.

We're just throwing a lot of anecdata around here, unfortunately. It seems like people have quite a problem with, when they see an argument they disagree with, they say, "Not only are you wrong, there is no possible way that you could ever be correct"...and in this case, well, yeah...scientifically, it *is* possible that they're true to some extent. We just don't have any proof of it so we should assume there is no correlation.

Your opponent can be wrong without being an utter and total fuckwit.

(no offense, stoatwblr--you're one of the politer people I've talked to on /. lately)

Comment Re:An unidentified drone (Score 1) 325

What happened was basically a non-event. What gets reported is a near mass-casualty.

Pretty sure that it's a fair call to label anything that happens to an airliner on final approach as a near mass-casualty, considering the number of people on board and how takeoff and landing are by far the most vulnerable parts of the flight for an aircraft.

If the drone went into one of the engines and the pilot made a mistake, I would bet on casualties.

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