The idea is that if you vaccinate people but they still get the disease and don't get it as badly, they might not die as quickly, or might not die.

So if they get sick but don't die, the disease has longer to spread.

So I suppose if you're an Anti-vaxxer it's a great argument for why only you should get vaccinated for highly virulent diseases, but you should just let everyone else die faster.

Pretty much every state in the country has annotated laws that are owned by a private company under some kind of agreement with the state. The private company puts some money into indexing them, may have an el cheapo version available online, and charges very mysterious pricing for commercial use that varies by who your sales rep is and how big you are and the like. Physical copies may also be available.

In New York, for example, McKinney's costs about $10,500 for a physical copy: http://legalsolutions.thomsonr...

You can go to a library that has it, of course, but it's pretty ridiculous in today's day and age that you need to go to a library to get access to a law.

It's kind of like the building code--basically a group of experts is involved so the state lets them copyright the laws and sell them rather than having the state *pay* them for their work and make the result free.

They are able to do that because customers let them. If you want to use app X, you give app X access to way more information than app X needs, because consumers fundamentally don't care enough that apps compete on the basis of privacy.

There's a little difference in the enterprise space, of course. But on the consumer side, people just don't care.

They don't. There are not thousands of countries, nor (probably) religions. Thousands of people want to kill you--or at least would kill you, which isn't quite the same thing--if you give the order to bomb them. The US bombs groups, generally ones that do things that suck, and then those people encourage their friends to want to kill the US.

That doesn't mean US drone policy couldn't use a hard look--it could--but just because thousands of people want to kill you doesn't mean you are in need of serious contemplation. Thousands of people wanted to kill pretty much every head of state in history whose country was involved in a way.

Freezing and falling to Pluto's surface... if you were that far from the sun, you'd do it to.

It's not so much that it's *worse* than those things. It's certainly not worth than sex trafficking, for example, where you get these kids raped fifteen times a day. (Read "River of Innocents" to learn more, for example, or Kevin Bales' or Victor Malarek's books).

Fighting over what's "worst" or "ugliest" or so on is like fights over whose genocide is worse, or who has the most messed up family. At the end of the day it's pretty silly and it's usually a waste of time because you could be trying to deal with those problems rather than fighting about how to classify them. So let's accept "ugliest" as a rhetorical inaccuracy and move on.

Because a lot of it pretty goddamn ugly, and they should be able to say it. Reading a single white supremacist website and it's like eating this vile filth that makes you want the whole country to take a shower. It must suck to be the SS agent who *has* to read that shit for his job. I'm sure you professionally detach a bit while having to pretend to relate and are actually able to go after some of the fuckers, so it's not as terrible as it could be, but it's still pretty ugly.

We care because established players use regulatory capture to stop new and better business models, and a lot of those supposedly safety and insurance related laws are BS put there by the established players that vary from place to place.

Under a Lochean earned income theory of value (i.e. you should get paid for what you earn), paying an advertiser based on how successful you are at *retaining* customers sent your way seems wrong in most cases. The advertiser is then earning or not earning money based on how good of a job *you* are doing at retaining customers, rather than based on how good of a job *they* are doing at sending you customers.

There is one relevant component there still which is whether they are sending you the *right* customers, but usually we measure that by demographics and income rather than by the metric of how long they stay on your site, which is much more dependent on whether *you* are doing a good job retaining customers.

On the other hand, if you are determining what the advertiser should be paid based just on the free-market whatever-we-agree to idea, then you can pay them based on anything you both agree to, including the number of elephants who would fit in your living room. Most advertisers don't sell advertising based on how effective they are at getting customers to buy things, though--that's what salespeople do, and our society tends to make a significant distinction between sales and advertising.

Yeah. How dare a tech company be aspirational.

"Don't catch any bugs!" --Klingon border sentry to Enterprise

People did foresee it, but that doesn't mean the decision-makers decided against it.

Doctors knew that having hospitals professionally administered as a business would be a nightmare with lots of deleterious effects on patient care, but it's still how the profession has evolved.

The fact is that unless you personally know people who are familiar with a doctor's skill from a medical perspective, it is fundamentally *impossible* to tell if they're any good. And none of those people will talk outside their profession because it's a very private profession in a lot of ways.

I've known about surgeons with world-class reputations who were terrible in the operating room and others who don't have great reputations because they don't publish a lot but are amazing with patients or have amazing surgical skill. You just don't know 99% of the time, so you make the best decision you have with the information you can get. And if it's a major surgery, you don't go to whoever it is your HMO suggests you go to--you actually do some research and ask intelligent questions and consider options and get a second opinion on how best to proceed and reject a doctor who can't answer a basic question or is flustered at being asked and so on.

A neutral rating system is a good idea but it has to be able to normalize for the extent of the diagnosis, and that is a hard problem that apparently wasn't done well here. There are metastasized cancers that are curable and ones that are not, and a whole range of treatability, and lumping them into N3 or N4 after a certain point is going to discourage doctors from operating on harder N4s or harder N3's, for example.

You can also get a really aggressive cancer or the like that a good surgeon can tell under the microscope is incredibly aggressive, that needs to be treated quickly and radically, and the system is really bad about penalizing people for spending the money to do that because the system will say "it just fits into type X," an early-stage small cancer, for example.

Threatening you with a gun is assault (i.e. threatening you with physical harm) and you can get arrested for it. You can also get sued if you have done an intentional act that is a legal and but-for cause of putting someone in apprehension of imminent bodily harm.

If you assault someone with your killer robot, it's still assault. If you do something stupid but intentional with the robot and it makes people afraid it will hurt them, they can still sue.

We don't actually need new laws to go after people who do something bad with a robot.

Separate, yes; unrelated, not so much. I hypothesize that not many people with $300 in their bank account have a $250K line of credit, for example.

We advertise based on bank account and related value metrics all the time, of course. The specific information might be protected to some extent by laws, but the media kit for most good advertising mediums gives you income and net worth type information about your target audience.

Obviousness rejection, anyone? Still, we're not very good about those.

Wonko? Is that you?

Thanks for all the fish!

You are assuming sarcasm. I don't hear genuine sarcasm so much as ignorant making-light-of-evil because I hear people rationalize this kind of behavior. It is how modern-day slavery, gun-running, and old-people scams continue to happen. So if I don't hear OP as sarcasm, it's because it usually *isn't sarcasm,* and being sarcastic about it is ignorant.

Yes, all true with differing caveats. There are some kinds of stupid that can't be cured or are harder to cure because of the receptivity of the patient. Sometimes other avenues work (changes in social attitudes coming from their friends or co-workers) and create a useful feedback loop to correct some of the stupid. And sometimes, absolutely, kids are raised with habits that are intended to keep them ignorant or deluded. (See, e.g., going to religious service once a week).

You can't fix some versions of stupid, but sometimes you can make it better or less bad, either for that person, or in preventing the next guy from being the same kind of stupid.