Thanks for this, but I hope you don't mind:
Rich people don't donate organs in exchange for money. EVER. Poor people do. So yeah, let's help those economically poor people become even poorer in body and hasten their exit by letting them sell off pieces of themselves, and decrease the surplus population.
FTFY
3) For all the hand-wringing about the poor people who will feel the pressure to sell a kidney, there is a very legitimate argument that those poor people should decide on their own if they want $50,000 for a kidney. What merits the state's law against them selling something they own? And what about poor people who need a kidney? Do they stand a better chance if there are fewer incentives, and fewer kidneys?
Stand down,
There is an even more legitimate argument to be made that no civilised society should force anyone into this kind of choice. But then we are talking about libertarians here, so civilised behaviour is not really at the top of their list of priorities...
Organlegging: Technology needed to deal in illicitly obtained body parts.
Bill Christensen wrote: As far as I know, Niven was the first writer to really work with a topic that is just starting to become a problem, thanks to drugs that make transplantation viable.
Indeed. I think the main thing he got wrong was the time window before artificial replacements become viable. He was thinking hundreds of years, but it's probably more like 25-50, with no rejection issues thanks to adult stem cell technology.
So what does it say about you that you find such things attractive?
We heard this joke the morning after the disaster.
What I would have loved to have seen is collection of data of how sick jokes spread after a disaster. Given this was pre-internet, the sick Challenger jokes spread extremely quickly, and it would be interesting to see how many origins they had and how they spread out from there. I suspect most of the Challenger jokes weren't thought up by one person and spread, but thought up independently by perhaps hundreds of different people and spread out from there.
I was TA-ing a calculus class at the time, and the prof had added an extra credit question to the final "For 5 points, tell a joke, any joke" just to get us through the 5 hours grading marathon without killing each other. We got a bunch of jokes, but sadly the only one that stuck was
Q: What do NASA and Van Halen have in common?
A: They are both "Hot for Teacher".
At the time, one of my friends with Wall Street connections opined that financiers were the source of a lot of these jokes (this was just when email was taking off). It's good to know that the callousness of the financial industry has only improved with time...
The second reason is that the deviation from rationality may often be viewed as a stochastic variable with zero mean. Ignoring it affects individual cases, but not the overall conclusions.
What is interesting about current research is that this assumption appears to not be true a lot of the time.
You obviously know nothing about women.
My wife loves chocolate as well, but hates to eat it because she likes being skinny more than she likes eating chocolate (and if you ask any woman, the two are mutually exclusive).
Right: You're the one perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes, but I'm the guy who knows nothing about women...
...and you are the one who missed that the GP was making a statement of fact about one particular woman who they know well, not making a stereotypical generalisation. But since you bring it up, my wife has also said this to me pretty much verbatim...
Isn't this what the "wearable computing" poll was all about?
I am not a nuclear physicist, so I really don't know the answer to this. Hasn't a controlled meltdown been done in a lab experiment before though? If so, what is different with this one in comparison to past experiments?
Good question, and the answer is: Yes, many times in multiple countries. One of the other posts in this thread is by a guy who was in charge of the data processing for one of them.
Don't they have an open-air experiment going on already? Just take a day trip to Fukushima.
As some other wag pointed out, that one was poorly instrumented...
The paradigm where engineers attempt to make sure it never happens has its limits. Looking at what happens during the failure will allow engineers to develop meaningful "defense in depth" measures.
That was understood decades ago, and has been SOP for that long in other safety critical applications like aircraft. The fact that it wasn't done before this is extreme negligence.
As any number of posters have pointed out, this kind of testing has been done many times before in multiple countries. This is just the first time that Japan has conducted such experiments.
People like you are going to force me to wear masks in public.
I'm cool with that, so why wait?
When thinking about human abilities way back when it's useful to remember St. Ambrose.
Living around 400AD, St Ambrose is reported to be the first human to read without moving his lips.
Yes, before him, no one thought to read a book without saying the words aloud...
I don't know about the first. Plutarch records that Julius Caesar had the same skill. (The context is pretty funny too - Caesar was reading a mash note from Cato's sister during a Senate meeting, but Cato thought it was an incriminating letter from an enemy of the state and demanded to read it, much to Cato's embarrassment. The fact that Cato threw it back at him, calling him a drunkard, is also funny because Cato was himself a notorious drunk whose Stoic principles didn't allow him to even buy good wine...)
This is the world we live in, and these are the hands we're given
(A more real Genesis, insofar as it actually exists and isn't a fiction made up to maintain control)
Oh, come on, even Dawkins keeps the KJV around because he loves the poetry and quotes it all the time.
as it turns out, they were viewing it thru an SN7404 and so the image was actually inverted.
Ah, another nerd from the 1970s! I'm getting all sniffly about my Heathkit digital breadboarding um thingo with the LEDs!
God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein
