Exactly. In order to become a scientist one generally has to become an expert in a highly specialized field that might not be the right field necessary to judge the overall impact of a technology on society. Nicholas Nassim Taleb gives the example of a carpenter who builds a roulette wheel. That person knows every inch of the machine, yet it is not the best person to determine issues of probability about the machine (e.g., is it a fair bet, what is a good betting strategy, etc.). For those questions, you need a statistician, or even a gambler with a very good "gut".

Another analogy is cryptography. For a good cryptographic cipher, you can't possibly brute force the math. But for any particular implementation, there might be other attacks that have nothing to do with the math, but rather, on knowing how to place a keylogger on the person's computer, or a social engineering attack. So a mathematician is probably not the best person to understand the risks of computer security, even though they are the only person who can understand the algorithm being used.

In the case of a GMO scientist, they might (will?) not know the entire industrial chain that takes things from the lab to the manufacturing plant to the field. So they can't know all of the risks involved, and would typically have a financial incentive to naysay those risks anyways.

Having said all that, I am personally not too worried about GMO in the foodchain (as a safety issue), I would be more concerned about things like patent protection and other IP issues. But I understand that people's fears are not going to be assuaged just because some scientist says they are unfounded.

Precisely. Whenever people try to make a moral equivalence between some Western nations like the US or UK and some totalitarian hellhole by saying, "The US starts wars too" or "The US discriminates against minorities too" they should remember this kid's quote. But not the bolded part that parent highlights, rather the sentence before it - "We don't try to influence the government or what's happening in [my country]." When the US starts wars that people don't like, half the population tries to influence the government. When minorities are oppressed, people change what happens.

All countries and places have problems, the difference is what people can do deal with them.

Is there a +1 Meta moderation? Or should it be -1 Meta? I'm going to keep reading your post and gp post until my head explodes. Well played, sir.

No no no...clearly you need some kind of further explanation, perhaps a metaphor, or even an analogy, using some kind of personal transportation technology in order for this to make sense. I am sure that one of the many knowledgeable commenters on this site will provide one shortly.

This is a great idea and wonderful in it's simplicity. I actually assumed that this was the BB CEO's proposal, and that the summary and the article was just misunderstanding.

But no, he really is saying that we should continue to have closed protocols, just that their sponsors should be forced by the government to put them on Blackberries. Interestingly, he only mentions that they should be forced to run on iPhones, Android, and Blackberry, and doesn't mention Windows phones - "iMessage for me and not for thee!". So I can only assume that his proposal isn't really about forcing app "openness" (which is a stupid idea, but at least it's a coherent idea), but rather just a simple handout from the makers of online services to his company. Which I guess is his job to do, but I hope nobody takes this seriously.

Those are all excellent points that can help us to increase the *supply* of health care (which is something that should be done no matter what is done on the allocation side). But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we can ever make the amount of health care that could be supplied equal to the amount of health care that we want. For the former will always be finite and the latter will always be infinite (mod singularity).

So even after increasing the supply with the kind of reforms you suggest, we will still have the problem of how do we allocate those resources. And if we continue to use the current Rube Goldberg contraption we will still have problems.

All discussions of the health care system needs to start and end with agreement on this quote, if nothing else. Of course we can't afford all the health care that we want; we also can't afford all of the iPhones that we want, or education, or anything, really. Economics is the study of how we allocate finite resources to try to satisfy infinite wants, and nowhere is that more stark than with health care.

Whether the method for allocating those finite resources is a price system, a queueing system, a random drawing, or otherwise, there are always trade-offs. The problem with health care is that nobody wants to acknowledge that some trade-off will be required. If you only use prices, then the poor won't get as much care as the rich. If you only use queues, then everybody will suffer with ailments during the wait. So we have this phenomenally complex system that tries to pretend that there are no limits to our medical resources, because while we are generally OK with the fact that rich people can have the latest iphone while others make do with generic android, or that you wait in line to get a table at your favorite restaurant, we are apparently not OK with hearing that someone doesn't get exactly the health care that they want when they want it because they don't have enough money, or other people with the same problem have booked the doctor's time for weeks.

Once we are honest about who we are willing to deny care to, then we can have a productive conversation about health care. Everyone can say "This is how I think care should be allocated" and we would create a system that allocates resources according to the wishes of the people, as expressed by their elected representatives. But instead we create layer upon layer of employer backed insurance, and government backed insurance, with some private delivery, but some public delivery, so that nobody can understand it. So now people's positions on health care reform are mere reflections of mood affiliation rather than of what they actually want out of the system.

This one? I suppose they would be as much an expert on drone warfare as anybody.

Off topic but I hope this helps:

Powerful magnetic stud finder. Works better than just a magnet, and better than any kind of auto sensing electronics or something. I have inch thick lathe and plaster walls so the studs are waaaaay back there but this works really well. It takes a little practice to get used to the very subtle pull but once you get the touch it works wonders.

So many things wrong here

For term life you absolutely care about the financial stability of the company. Term life isn't "short-term" like 6 months, it's "short term" like 10-20 years. Property insurance is typically a 1 year term and the difference between a company that looks like it will be able to pay it's bills for 1 year versus one that can pay for the next 20 is huge. Just ask pets.com.

Your understanding of whole life is totally incorrect. Whole life is a life insurance policy that does not terminate after a set number of years; rather, as long as you can cover the cost of premiums, it continues to be in force. An annuity is an entirely different product (although it can also be sold by insurance companies).

As for dying in year 29 of the 30 year term policy, he is referring to the fact that since you are still in the term, you should get the death benefit (whether you paid as a single premium or annual premiums is not so important). The problem is if the company goes bankrupt in year, say, 24, then you don't get a death benefit. True, you aren't on the hook for premiums after the company goes belly up, but if you get 30 year term insurance as a healthy 35 year old, then the company goes bankrupt after 24 years (when you are 59), you are in big trouble. You were paying relatively cheap premiums that took into account that you have been paying since you were 35, but now you have to go find another company and get a new policy, now as a 59 year old. And if you have developed health issues since then it's even worse.

Proper nouns that are regular words can definitely provide some laughs for machine translation, but it's not as bad as it seems. Even to a native English speaker, a kid named North West is kind of funny.

Understanding a foreign language will always require some knowledge of the culture and society from which you are translating from, and so if you know the culture has kids named for "Sky" and "Hope" then to see those words pop up in sentences where it doesn't really fit you aren't surprised.

The best example of this is in Hofstader's GEB, where he talks about translating Dostoevsky to English. The translator has a choice to make when copying the name of the main street. It is an actual Russian word, that has an English translation. So maybe you translate the street name to it's English equivalent. But the Russian street name is a common Russian street name, whereas in English it's not a common name for a street at all. So maybe instead of simply directly translating the Russian name, you change it to a nice, comfortable English street name, like "Elm Street." He ends up humorously suggesting the best choice in translation might be to just read a Dickens novel!

And even more patients are going to say that. Hopefully someone listens....

"Peace through tyranny!"

-Megatron

This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard all day. Of course politics decides who is in a country. Or are you saying that these people all just happened to slip and fall into a bullet for entirely non-political reasons?