And so it starts exactly as I predicted here: He went to the emergency room with flu like symptoms and they ... wait for it .... SENT HIM HOME.

Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.

Now THAT'S frightening!

Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".

While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...

The New York Times Opines:

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, teaches at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.

Correct. Furthermore when you have gutted the demand side of the economy what emerges are phenomena like Walmart where lower consumer prices are achieved through a monopsony (the private sector form of the "single payer" holy grail socialized medicine seeks for the same reason) that not only pays its suppliers less, but also its employees less because as the jobs market contracts, there is nowhere else to work ultimately. Walmart also knows EXACTLY what it is doing when it trains its employees in the art of extracting government benefits from a decreasing government revenue stream.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if the tax base were on net assets rather than economic activity as at least then the companies engaging in corrupt hiring practices --such as I witnessed during the huge ramp up in H-1b circa 2000 when I was told I could hire all the programmers from India for HP but not the single US-citizen specialist in the field that I needed -- will be dumped because the companies doing them will be put out of business by a more level playing field in the free market.

silfen confesses "Yes, H-1B workers are at the bottom of the pay scale for the simple reason that H-1B visas are for people just starting out."

Ah I see. So the violation of the H-1B statute is so pervasive now that people are under the impression that it is for people who are just starting out.

My mistake.

Mark et al should simply be thrown in jail for fraud and since this has gotten so far out of hand as to permit responses like silfen's to have the remotest credibility, the jail time should be mandatory without parole.

Its tragic that Mark et al are being forced to put up with just sort of OK US workers.

You know one step that Mark et al could take that would grease the skids on their immigration reforms?

Pay the geniuses they want to import what they're worth. See The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers.

In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.

Interesting. Is the geometry of that so-called "development vehicle" representative of the production vehicle's?

Back in 1981-1983 when I was local support team leader for Space Studies Institute in Miami, FL promoting the idea of space colonies among the locals, one of the slides we showed was of this artist's conception of a Single Stage to Orbit Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing system proposed by Boeing to loft solar power satellites into LEO. This vehicle also appeared in Gerard O'Neill's original edition of "The High Frontier" that Jeff Bezos probably read while he was becoming the valedictorian of his high school class.

Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.

James Clerk Maxwell

Bezos's Blue Origin Part of Boeing Team Bidding for Taxi to ISS

http://slashdot.org/submission...

Submitted by Baldrson on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:58AM
Baldrson (78598) writes
"The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter.""

The sooner SpaceX gets away from reliance on government-as-customer the better. They are within a hairs-breadth of a dramatic drop in launch cost and if the effect of this is what I expect it to be, there will be an explosion of business in space as new regimes of space activity open up with SpaceX the primary transport.

A Hallmark greeting card with a heart-shaped solar flare overlaying an "X" obviously meaning "love and kisses". It reads: "To Earth, with love. -- Sun"

Prize awards have high leverage on private investment. Moreover, prize awards aren't spent only for the desired returns -- thereby relegating risk management to the private sector where it belongs.

Oh, I forgot, NASA's money comes largely from political considerations about which districts get how much government pork.

Never mind.

Java has stuck around for the same reason Cobol stuck around for so long: It's corporate.

Does that mean Java isn't cool? No. But are we going to say Cobol is cool because it stuck around for so long?