I assume this is because the care is improving and more people are pulling through but outbreaks like this often become less virulent over time as well.
Oh good, instead of losing 90% of the country, we might just lose a few New York Cities. That makes it better.
you're really excited to give your rights away, but I'm not going to let you take mine.
Uh, if you're in the one town in the US where there is an Ebola outbreak you're not going to be able to stop the rest of the country from taking your rights. There will be fences, tanks, armies, drones, aircraft, and the general works surrounding your town. Your stash of AR-15s in the basement aren't going to accomplish much except maybe to keep your neighbors from stealing your food assuming you have a stockpile so that you can stay inside and let the disease blow over. Besides, if you do have such a stockpile then just hunker down - you'll outlive the epidemic anyway, which is probably why you have that stockpile to begin with.
Well, that is if the rest of the country has the brains to set up a strong quarantine. There is a good chance that this won't look good in the polls so we'll just ask everybody to be nice and stay at home, and watch the disease overrun the country. Maybe I should work on my own stockpile...
But, if the government has any brains they'll put up a perimeter around the town, lock down all air travel into/out of the country, And burn down everything within 10 miles of the town to create a no-man's land. I mean, we are talking about a plague that could kill half the population here. Given a choice of raising taxes half a percent to rebuild the no-man's land after it is all over, or watching the entire country turn into a post-apocalyptic horror story, I'll take a bit of authoritarianism and call you in the morning.
I'm not convinced some level of quarantine wouldn't be wise. Just ban general air/maritime travel to/from any location within 100 miles of a reported Ebola case, and lock down borders/etc as best as you can. I agree that the disease will certainly continue to spread, but then you just expand the quarantine region as it does, staying a step ahead.
The goal isn't so much to prevent any spread at all as to keep the disease off of aircraft, where it could spread globally overnight.
Sooner or later the spread of the disease will end up running against geographical barriers, like the Sahara or the Atlantic/Indian Oceans. Gaza certainly would be a defensible border. There are limits on how far the disease could spread against a coordinated effort to contain it.
Plus, a decent quarantine will at least slow down the spread so that you have a fighting chance to do something about it. What is the alternative, throwing your hands up in the air and saying, "sure, feel free to get on a plane if you're sick?" Better to have a handful of people sneaking through the jungles between checkpoints spreading the disease than hundreds of people taking busses.
If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
- because it is in your best interest to recognise that if I cannot own property, then neither can you.
I do not debate that libertarianism is in my own best interest. That does not make it morally right. There are many who cannot own property because they do not have the ability to purchase it, because they do not have the ability to earn money. I do not accept that these folks should be left as destitute.
Ultimately libertarianism fails because it puts the right of property above virtually everything else. In the name of liberty it ends up reducing virtually everybody to slavery.
I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.
Nobody is stealing your money - you're paying taxes. The rest of us will recognize your right to retain the rest of your property if you recognize your responsibility to help care for the indigent. If you don't do your part, then why should I recognize that you have any right to own property at all?
But, call it theft if you like. It really doesn't change the fact that you have no choice but to comply.
If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.
I imagine that you'd be a little less lofty in your views if you had one of those irresponsible parents. Heck, some kids don't have any parents/family at all.
The fact is that all the property/etc you've worked so hard to obtain is only yours as the result of you having been born to parents who raised you well, and who gave you genes that allow you to support yourself. Absent either of those, and especially absent the latter, you'd be as well-off as an ape that shares 98% of your genetics. As a result, I certainly have no moral issues with requiring anybody with the ability to take care of themselves to spend some of their effort taking care of others, using force if they do not wish to do so.
Hate to self reply, but think of it like shooting a rifle round at a blimp. The bullet is going to just sail right through both sides, with neither object being affected all that much.
You have a few stars worth of neutornium the size of a big asteroid or maybe a small moon moving towards a red giant that is perhaps similar in mass to our own sun.
I can buy that eventually the one ends up inside the other. What I wonder about is how you get from a neutron star falling towards a red giant to a neutron star inside a red giant.
I'd think the neutron star would have so much momentum that it would basically blast right through the star and come out the other side.
Of course, a more likely scenario is a mutual orbit where over many orbits the stars interact via their extended atmospheres/etc slowing their orbits until they merge. Still, I'd think that neutron star would keep making orbital passes deeper and deeper into the red giant's atmosphere, basically plowing a trench into the red giant which of course fills right back in each time.
I just don't see either star changing velocity enough on a single pass for them to merge.
How do you "crack down on" people following the rules and doing exactly what is best for them, paying the least amount of taxes?
By changing the rules so that people following the rules and doing exactly what is best for them end up paying more taxes.
What do you think parents are for? Children are the responsibility of their parents, not the state.
That's great. What do you do with the children of irresponsible parents? Do you just let them starve when they turn out unemployable?
And what do you do with mentally retarded cripples? I guess they can beg, except that they probably won't quite master that and will probably end up trespassing on some self-righteous gun owner's lawn and get shot (since everybody is their own police in this utopia).
Yup, I can't wait to see how they advertise their services with this twist.
Comcast: Would you like to buy a fast-lane?
Customer: What happens if I don't buy a fast lane?
Comcast: If you don't buy a fast lane then your connections will only operate at the 50Mbps rate that your plan has purchased.
Customer: What happens if I do buy a fast lane?
Comcast: Then for that one website we will actually deliver the 50Mbps rate that you already paid for, as long as you don't use it too much.
Or, you could just say that you pay one fee to get 50Mbps, and then you pay another fee to REALLY get 50Mbps, for one website.
My definition of "cure "is when people stop dying of these diseases. My point was that medical doctors and psychiatrists in particular have but a tenuous grasp on the actual workings of the human body.
To be fair, many of these "diseases" are just labels applied to general classes of symptoms, which probably have many underlying mechanisms. It is a bit like saying we haven't come up with a cure for "ache" yet, even though many conditions that cause aches do in fact have genuine cures.
Many doctors contend if you have a mental illness that it is not a medical problem. You have to go see a psychiatrist for that. As if the brain weren't part of the human body.
Heck, I can't figure out why in the US dentistry is treated differently than any other form of medicine. I can appreciate that insurers don't want to pay for cosmetic treatments like teeth whitening, but if I break any bone in my body other than a tooth, it is treated differently than if I break a tooth.
I don't think people appreciate how biological reasoning actually is, and just how modular the brain is, with every part having to trust the other parts to do their jobs. Your reasoning might be perfectly intact, but perhaps your visual perception has a problem, which means that you're going to make bizarre decisions.
You can have a brain that does 95% of everything spot-on, but some very specific abnormality causes really bizarre cognitive functionality.
Just talk to anybody young who had a serious stroke. They could probably describe just how things changed for them, what did and didn't recover, and so on. In the beginning they might have been completely oblivious to there even being anything wrong - sometimes they perceive everybody around them as suddenly becoming dumb/etc.
My big issue with multiplayer is just the inability to hit pause or save. It feels like the game is in charge of me instead of the other way around.
Umm... simply come with a set of glasses and put on the ones your enemy wears?
I'm not an expert on laser goggles, but I'm not sure that you can tell just by looking from a distance. Sure, some are obviously different in color, but what I don't know is whether there are 12 different types of goggles that all look orange-ish and how much protection you get if you pick the wrong one.
Plus they aren't very cheap - it might cost you $35-100 to acquire each one, and you might need a dozen for complete coverage.
That said, if the companies selling this gear publish their specs you might find that there are only 2-3 wavelengths in significant use and that the glasses needed for each have a distinctive appearance, which would allow you tell which one is in use.
Of course, you'll also need your gas mask, anti-microwave suit, padding, and body armor (for when the police get frustrated and just start using live rounds). I'd recommend doing your protesting in the winter.
The rule on staying alive as a program manager is to give 'em a number or give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
