Illusion of social mobility. We have traps like the welfare trap and the whole Federal effort to get everyone a college education. If we could eliminate both of these, our upward mobility would be great. Granted, upward mobility impacts balance: the economy may become more wealthy and support more people at a higher level, but there is always a point where someone must come (or stay) down for someone else to move up. Post-scarcity society happens when everyone can move up.

That's self-contradictory. Maybe the 121 who voted against it disagreed with passing such a weak and toothless bill. I would have voted against it; give me a pile driver, not a 6 ounce ball peen hammer.

Originally, these things were not known. Also, we're better at determining where a wound is; back in working man days, you had scrapes and cuts and bruises all over your body. Times have changed.

It's about amount and growth. Anthrax is on everything; you can refine anthrax from the soil in your back yard. Straight white powder anthrax will cause severe health impacts, even though you're constantly touching and inhaling anthrax.

With some notable exceptions. Yogurt, for example, has been shown to cause an increase in GABA sensors in the brains of mice. Disconnecting the gut neural ganglia from the rest of the body prevents this from happening, as does sterilizing the yogurt. Thus we know there's two mechanisms here: probiotic interaction with the gut, and gut interaction with the brain.

With that knowledge, we explain the association in humans between intake of yogurt and reduced stress. There's a gap--we haven't damaged the neural pathways of humans to see if that blocks the effects--but we have pretty strong evidence for that one.

This particular instance has better study than other probiotics because it deals with neurology, which is a more interesting and more rigorously studied field. Nebulous improvements in digestive health are less interesting, harder to measure, harder to directly alter by experiment, and thus tend to have weaker evidence.

You bathe for health. You don't bathe for an optimum natural balance; you do it so you get nasty pathogens off your body, and don't get infected wounds.

Apparently some health comes at the expense of some other health, like how antibiotics destroy gut bacteria but save you from death by sepsis.

I'm not angry over something in government; I'm dismayed at the entire movement of society. This isn't "I don't understand 9/11 so I think it was an inside job!" time.

Toxicology involves dosage level. The level of BPA leeched from polycarbonate is below the toxic threshold as currently understood; while the level of BPS leeched is a *lot* higher than the toxic threshold. Toxic effects of BPS polycarbonate are much more likely and more severe than BPA polycarbonate simply because of the higher dosage--both chemicals have roughly the same toxicity.

So yes. Your new BPA-Free baby bottles are effectively identical to your old BPA baby bottles, if we added a mega-dose of extra BPA to it. That's what the American people fought for: more poisonous polycarbonate.

I keep telling people polypropylene is a superior material, but nobody listens.

You are whining because you don't trust a nuclear company with commercial interest.

In the past, US companies have exposed us to dangerous chemicals. US plastic manufacturers used BPA for plastic. We are banning BPA in the US; polycarbonate now uses BPS, which carries the same toxicity concerns but leeches in much greater concentrations. That means our BPA-Free polycarbonate is more toxic than BPA polycarbonate; BPA polycarbonate is roughly harmless.

Yes, it's trivially easy for small activists to create false fears in the minds of idiots who are at odds with professionals who know what they're doing. The professionals may be lying; but you're still an idiot if you don't actually understand what problems you're imagining up. For the professionals, it's clear: they're either lying to you or they're not. For you, it's hit-or-miss: you're screaming about something that's either a concern or it isn't, but it sounds scary in either case.

In this corner, we have the experts who have stake to lie to you.

In this corner, we have a bunch of local idiots being baited by some agenda-driven journalist who is likely to twist facts and probably doesn't understand nuclear safety anyway, so probably thinks non-issues are terrifying while making serious issues out of other things he knows are non-issues.

Who will prevail?!

The number of times the stress must be applied is shown on the X axis. Essentially, steel can handle anything below some 30ksi for about infinite cycles--you can keep flexing and relaxing the steel *forever* and it won't break. Aluminum, not so much: even low amounts of stress repeatedly applied will cause it to break eventually.

The failure mode of steel is to deform a little. Repeat fatigue stress on steel will eventually start to bend it. Aluminum eventually cracks. As stated, steel has a rather high stress tolerance: it can cycle significant loads without experiencing any fatigue. Aluminum can't, and will steadily near its failure mode.

This doesn't make steel a better material for airplanes or bike frames. Aluminum bike frames will break eventually, but are lighter than steel; an aluminum frame can last 30 years under heavy non-professional use. The duty cycle a road warrior will put on a bicycle is a hell of a lot different than the duty cycle a highly-tuned professional athlete will put on a bicycle. Likewise, you can design an aluminum frame to handle the stresses provided by the duty cycle of a commercial airliner, such that the plane doesn't break in half over 30 years of flights.