That was just about the most intellectually lazy comment I have ever seen.

I was going to post a point by point rebuttal....but I couldn't be bothered.

Maybe - but it works in the short term. I lived in Ireland for a few years, the 22c was enough to make me (and most people) take my own bags shopping so far fewer bags were used. Now I'm back in free bag country and it feels weird and unnecessary to be given a load of new bags every time I go shopping.

I agree though that even an 80% reduction doesn't solve the problem, an environmentally safe bag would be the best solution.

That's also a tricky solution, how can you know what you would want when in a certain set of circumstances? People adapt very quickly in chronic illness, such that quality of life is maintained to degree that would be surprising to the 'healthy' individual. I would certainly never leave instructions for my own killing under any circumstances, because I know how quickly I can change my mind. Would you trust your 20 year old self to end your 80 year old self's life if it's not up to his youthful standards?

Also - the experience from the Netherlands is that advance directives for physician assisted suicide are almost never acted on for one reason or another. (Can't find the reference for that at the moment).

Agree that torture is a ridiculous word to use in this case, especially for somebody with no ability to communicate. I wonder how much the suffering of the patient is conflated with the suffering of the family, or the perception of what it might be like to be in that situation (without actually knowing).

But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.

Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is

Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.

Well that is the position on just about every other mode of transport.

The comments are often very useful when posted against articles on specific journal websites. Like all academic publishing, you'll have to use some critical faculty to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The British Medical Journal (and I'm sure other journals) have done this for a while, and it is used and is useful. People tend to use it as publishing a 'letter to the editor', but its a lot less selective.

So are you saying that your rules have to minimize net suffering across people (a utilitarian perspective) or that any rule that creates suffering in an individual, however small, can't be acceptable despite how much suffering it might alleviate in others?

Also - does inaction that leads to suffering (ie not banning cigarette advertising) count as causing suffering?

You are quite right. What I said only applies to 85% of the UK population.

How do you distinguish suffering because of the rules from suffering that would have happened anyway? And what do you mean by 'suffer'? I think it has to be defined in terms of a deprivation or loss, but that could only really be a consequence of something that you had in the first place because of the social or economic system you were living in - so separating having whatever it is to losing whatever it is would be difficult.

The UK has just undergone a massive reorganisation - and different aspects of healthcare are run and funded at different government levels. Public health is locally (at the county level) funded and organised (but with some central funding contingent on meeting specific targets), primary care is centrally funded but locally organised (by areas that are not co-terminus with any local government region), and hospital services are nationally funded but hospitals run pretty much independently (i think - i don't know a lot about hospitals). There's still a central government department for health sort of setting the agenda, and the national institute for clinical excellence making guidelines that other groups are supposed to follow. So your healthcare can vary a lot depending on where you live, which I guess is a reasonable definition for something which is not nationally organised.

Yes - that's the hypothesis, but the evidence to support it doesn't come from an observed correlation between trees and health, as previous people have said that would be confounded will all kinds of other factors which would be impossible to measure. The evidence comes from the observed correlation between the pest and health, which is presumably (and this is big assumption) not confounded with other factors, with the presence of trees as the only possible mediating factor.

There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees. The claim is that health is correlated with the presence of something that kills the trees, effectively at random (or at least in a way which is uncorrelated with anything that also directly affects human health) making this quite a neat natural experiment. Your arguments about other confounding factors don't hold in this case. look up natural experiments or instrumental variables if you want to know more about the method.

I remember just after I moved to Norwich a bus driver refusing to understand what I meant when I said 'town'. Its a city! And a fine one at that.

I'm reading Slashdot! And I used to be a mathematician back when you had to submit papers to journals by mail.