What if your name is Clinton?

This site is for people who are smart enough and educated enough to be able to use both equally well.

But if all you can handle is division by ten, we've got a special handicapped section Just For You!

Why? Why should you be allowed to endanger the health of your fellow citizens and their families?

Reasonable precautions to prevent epidemics seems like "promoting the general welfare" which is the very foundation of government.

LOL - no, 1945. Hear me groaning? I usually catch typos before I hit the submit button - this time - no.

I don't know about 1845 - they may have had a little baby boom.

The Baby Boom began in 1845,

I really hope you don't think we had a Baby Boom after the Mexican-American War....

MIT Developing AI To Better Diagnose Cancer

FFS, it's not AI. It's a mindless program. Unthinking software. Data analysis software. Innovative to some degree perhaps, but AI? Hardly. No better than me stumbling in here and calling some DSP code I'd written "AI." Well, except I wouldn't do that. :/

When AI gets here, we'll have to call it something else what with all this crying wolf going on.

But legal skills create money.

No. Legal skills take money from place A and move it to place B. Lawyers don't create value. Engineers do.

You ought to re-think that. No, I'm not "firmly into the Baby Boom". The Baby Boom began in 1845, and had tapered off by the time I was born. The real baby boomers are all over sixty now.

Just like a $5 dollar discount coupon has no effect, since I still have to pay the rest of the bill?

The rate of medical exemptions is reasonable stable and small, and as long as the rate of people who had special exemptions was similarly low it was an acceptable risk, however, thanks to vaccine paranoia and the frauds who peddle it, the rate of unvaccinated children with special exemptions has rise dramatically, and no longer falls into "acceptable risk". So the exemptions are going away, and the parents of these children will have to find a different way to be ignorant and dangerous.

Libertarianism.

Yeah, we should go back to the tried and true British methods - firebomb cities! Dresden FTW!!!

I'm only below sea level when I go down south of the Lake (it's really interesting to be in a place where the water level in the canals is higher than the streets. Or higher than the second floor of your house, in some places.

On the other hand, I spend most of my time north of the Lake, and that puts me a good five or six feet above sealevel....

Yes, I do. It's why we have idiotic parents who aren't giving their kids vaccinations so now we have kids dying again of measles, whooping cough, etc. Diseases that a few decades ago were all but eradicated.

And which are still "all but eradicated". Check the numbers, we haven't had a significant uptick in measles cases in better than 20 years, and even that uptick didn't approach the uptick ten years earlier, which didn't approach the standard rates of measles pre-vaccine.

Note that measles seems to have a deathrate (in the developed world, in the last 50 years - it was much higher before that) of So, who is the real idiot? Someone who gets excited about a disease that is largely a non-issue, or someone who realizes that your chances of getting killed on the highway are higher than your chances of dying of the measles, with or without vaccine?

Interesting theory you have.

So, I gather from your comment that you know that the measles vaccine has about a 2.9% failure rate, that the US average immunization rate is 94.7% (ignoring the failure rate), for an effective immunization rate of 92.0%....

I also assume that you know that herd immunity is established at 90%+?

Likewise, I'll assume you know that even 100% immunization will still leave ~10 million people susceptible to measles in the US (that 2.9% failure rate isn't going to go away).

And I'll further assume that you think that when we enforce mandatory immunization and reach that rockhard MINIMUM of 10 million susceptible people that we'll never, ever have a year when 147 people get sick, right?

Oh, have I managed to hint strongly enough that you're completely innumerate yet? It's not hard to come up with the numbers, and calculator programs make it pretty easy to put real numbers on things if you're capable of thinking that way.

Conclusion: by the standards of epidemiologists, we're already pretty much safe from measles, and increasing the uptake rate of the vaccine will have minimal effect on measles outbreaks in the US.

Oh, an interesting bit I noticed back when this outbreak first occurred is that the fatality rate of measles decline precipitously about thirty years before measles vaccines became standard. No idea why, but we didn't even bother making measles vaccine "mandatory" (to the extent that it is already mandatory) till a generation after measles had declined into a non-issue. And the death rates for measles (in terms of deaths per measles case, NOT deaths per population) has hardly changed since the introduction of the vaccine....

You have to be very careful with Penn and Teller, they have a strong libertarian bent and they seem to frequently fail when researching issues that involve their politics. I wouldn't trust them on issues like second hand smoke that they are likely to view as "government interference". It tends to make them derp out and present a weak one-sided case as if there were no valid counter-arguments. Personally, I stopped watching "Bullshit" after a few too many political shows where they left me disappointed with their half-assed, one-sided, "facts".