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Comment Re:Before and after (Score 1) 132

They also don't want power-generating windmills near their homes. Is that because they cause cancer? And water treatment plants are generally not built in wealthy neighborhoods. Is this due to leukemia clusters? And they don't want adult video stores near their homes. Because of increased risk of polio?

Perhaps the NIMBY effect is slipshod and broad brushed against any disruption of the neighborhood, whether rationional or not.

Comment Re:What's a Tufte test? (Score 1) 132

This is not a "correlation is causation" scam. This is a "researcher degrees of freedom" scam. If you look at enough different variables you'll get a statistically significant result by chance.

The summary and title are not entirely honest. They looked not at "hospital admissions" but at "hospital admissions by discharge code. From all of this they found statistically significant correlations with cardiology and neurology inpatient rates being deemed significant. What does this mean?

The only thing it can mean is "further study is needed". Instead of looking at everything under the sun, researchers will need to look specifically at these variables and control for potentially confounding factors, such as a set of doctors or a hospital that begins admitting cardiology patients that they ordinarily would have discharged for home monitoring.

When you look at this many potential variables and sift out any hits the opportunity for false positives is large. This sort of preliminary study can be an important first step in epidemiology. It can also be an important step in pseudo-scientific scams. This kind of study gives us "super-foods" that everybody has to have because of their supposed health benefits. The differentiating factor is the follow-up studies that are done. Standing on its own, this study is meaningless with regard to fracking causing anything.

Comment Re: Above Congress? (Score 1) 161

Interestingly, HOAs do have the most scope and reach over your life (if you choose to live there). At least as pertains to your home life. The control how long your grass is, where you can park your car on your own property, what kind of toys you can put up for you kids in the yard, who can come over to your house, when and for how long.... they can be very intrusive. They can even have approval over the sale of the house when you decide to leave.

Pretty much just about anything they'd like can be in the HOA contract you agree to when you buy in. I live in HOA central down in south Florida. They are so pervasive that several of those weekend radio shows that are mostly advertisements for professional services are dedicated to HOA legal advice (both for homeowners and for HOA boards). I've not seen that elsewhere, but it seems to be a pretty hot topic around these parts. They have full slates of callers looking for solutions to perceived HOA abuses or homeowners who are resisting HOA mandates. On the few occasions that I've caught a few minutes, the legal experts seem to advise that "the HOA is going to win so just pay up" most of the time.

Comment Re:Looks like the second stage ruptured (Score 1) 316

True. But you do have to not watch such videos to downplay the significance of such atrocities and leave it all as background noise. The same goes for famine in Africa, police abuses here, water contamination in India, AIDS in Africa, etc, etc...

If the ISIL videos were shown on the US and European TV news in heavy rotation, would the pressure on western governments be different?

If the death of Kelly Thomas had been covered by the national news in the same manner as more recent and famous police abuse cases, might the issues at hand be getting a different hearing at the national level? (or Lloyd Smalley and Lillian Weiss, killed in their sleep in a wrong-house drug raid - or any number of others)

The information you take in shapes your opinions and the priorities you set. Living in Greece, only a few hundred miles away from these atrocities and presumably being a Christian - one of the groups targeted by these atrocities - one could see how keeping tabs on the actions of these people would have some personal interest to our Greek Nationalist compatriot.

Comment Re:Good. However.... (Score 1) 132

I have a Samsung S6. It will charge from 10% to fully charged in a little over an hour on a car fast charger while navigating and playing podcasts. I learned this while driving cross-country last week, sharing a charger with 2 other s6 users. 30 hours each way - might not have survived without the podcasts!

That being said, there's no reason that I can see for keeping the batteries so small. Doubling or even tripling the size of the battery wouldn't seriously impact it's ergonomics, and it would allow you to candy crush your way from NY to LA.

Comment Re:Not relevant? (Score 4, Insightful) 89

The guy in charge of selling data center computing as a service thinks that most companies should buy their data center computing from a company like his instead of rolling their own.

And this is surprising or controversial why?

In other news, the guy from Cisco thinks that companies will be looking to Cisco for fast, stable networking. And the guy from Intel thinks that companies will be looking to Intel for power efficient data center solutions.

This doesn't make them luddites.... it makes them salesmen.

Comment Re: Why? (Score 4, Insightful) 510

This is certainly one of the motivations. ,This article provides a lot of good links on the topic.

By combining anti-structuring laws with asset forfeiture the feds can steal most anything they'd like. There have been a lot of stories in recent years about small businesses that make frequent deposits under 10k getting their accounts and even their business siezed.

All without even an allegation of any criminal activity other than making deposits that are below the threshold for reporting. The drug warriors thought they were playing a game of gotcha with the drug kingpins. Nice work, geniuses....

Comment Huge grain of salt (Score 3, Insightful) 82

Any time a single device (or drug, or supplement, or treatment) purports to treat a wide variety of seemingly unrelated ailments, your first instinct should be heavy skepticism. Also, when a device purports to work for ailments that have soft endpoints and are amenable to placebo effect, you should evaluate any study carefully. The literature is filled with studies that purport to show promising results, only to collapse when more rigorous methods are applied.

epilepsy, depression, stroke, tinnitus, heart failure, migraines, asthma,

With the exception of stroke and heart failure, this is a list of ailments that are commonly targeted by scam medicine, because they are conditions that will often be self-reported as improved no matter what the intervention. When more rigorous measurements are applied, these effects tend to evaporate.

Let's hope it works, but let's look for some well done studies too.

Comment Not Wireless (Score 4, Informative) 75

This is not exactly wireless... It is not "hard wired' in that you don't plug in a cable. The technology uses a system of electric strips of alternating polarity and a pattern of contact pickups on the device to connect to the strips. It is cool, and should be much better than wireless in terms of efficiency.

Comment Re:More hoops before travelling through USA (Score 1) 200

Keeping advanced weaponry and/or the components thereof out of the hands of people who are championing our destruction has no bearing whatsoever on your liberty. You're creating a false equivalence. Have fun trying to exercise your liberty when you're dead.

Oh, I'd say it is definitely an infringement on individual liberty. It is just that we have decided that the security of the nation supersedes the freedom to sell arms to enemies of the nation.

You have to admit, there's a certain logic to avoiding selling rope to your lynch mob.....

Comment Re:More hoops before travelling through USA (Score 1) 200

You can adjust your W-2 (is that the right form?) so that you don't have any (Federal) income tax withheld. I don't think you can do that for other deductions, though.

You could, but you have to have within 10% of your final tax bill withheld to avoid penalties.

I suppose you intended to tell him he could adjust his employer's withholding to better match his deductions so that his net tax bill would be close to zero. This is sound advice. Nobody should let the government hold their money for free if they can help it.

Comment Re:Warmth? (Score 1) 286

I've been there. At nearly 14k feet it is wear-a-coat cold in the middle of summer on the summit, particularly at sunset (and you really don't want to miss sunset if you make the trek). The air is also very thin. You cannot fly an unpressurized aircraft above that height because of the thin air. FAA regulations require supplemental oxygen to fly above 12,500 feet for more than 30 minutes. Just a short jog uphill will leave you winded, even if you are in really good shape. The visitor's center is at about 9k feet and is much more hospitable.

There is also a notable lack of soil. It is mostly just rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. I really doubt very many people would be running about barefoot on the summit.

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