There is no if. There is no 100%.
"If" is anti-vaxism.
"100%" is antivaxism.

Real world data from a multitude of studies by a multitude of independent professionals show that vaccines are something like a hundred or a thousand times safer than any random food item.
There is no "if" there. There is no "100%" there. Vaccines are safer than food.

Ad hominem means "against the person". More specifically, an ad hominem attack is an argument that someone's statement is false, or should be ignored, because the person is bad.

When the argument is "don't listen to her, she's a nasty ugly bitch", that's ad hominem.

When the argument is "she's repeating stuff that was shown to be fraudulent research, and her claims have been exhaustively proven false, therefore she is wrong" is not ad hominem.

Proving her wrong, and then concluding she's a bad person because she's wrong, is not ad hominem.

Getting angry at her after she is proven wrong is not ad hominem.

Throwing gratuitous insults at her, after she is proven wrong, calling her an ugly bitch or whatever, after she is proven wrong, is not ad hominem. Gratuitous insults certainly add nothing to a debate, BUT THERE'S NO DEBATE HERE. On one side you have data and science and evidence, and on the other side you have an irrational social movement - fear based on a fraud all flying around a rumor mill of conspiracy theories and ignorance. "Don't take your child for their routine medical checkup, I heard the doctor is a pedophile! Don't take your child to any doctor for a routine medical checkup, you don't want to risk that doctor is part of the vast secret pedophile-ring that I hear is running the American Medical Association".

Your description of events is rather inaccurate.

Wakefield was being directly paid to do his "research" by a lawyer looking to file a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers.
Wakefield drew up a business plan, with figures for how many tens of millions of dollars a year could be brought in by marketing a competing vaccine
Wakefield established a contract with the medical school where he was working, requiring them to conceal the source of his funding, prohibiting them from disclosing his involvement with a pharmaceutical company.
Walkfeild established a contract with that pharmaceutical company requiring his involvement to be kept secret - secret specifically until he would be able to cash out on stock options.
Wakefield preformed "research" which, on later investigation, was found to be entirely fraudulent.
In order to publish his research the Journal REQUIRED the disclosure of things like the source of his funding and relevant business plans or involvement with pharmaceutical companies. In order to get his fraudulent study published in the Journal he fraudulently denied the existence of any financial conflicts of interest.
Countless legitimate scientists, a ton of valuable medical research money and research resources, were all WASTED trying to replicate the fraudulent Wakefield paper. It resulted in massive confirmation that the original claims were fictional and that vaccines were extremely safe. And then the specific investigation revealing exactly how Wakefield's original work was fraudulent.

And if things had ended there, all of this would be a pretty insignificant non-story. But things didn't end there.

We got a melting-pot that took on a life of it's own. We got the news media hyping an insignificant "research study" based on an insignificant patient sample, a paper which had not yet been confirmed (and which would turn out to be fraudulent). And in the melting pot we got parents of autistic children DESPERATE for any explanation why their kids have autism. And in the melting pot we got the kooks whom no one usually listens to.... the ones who spin conspiracy theories about vaccinations being some evil government plot... kooks who latched on to vaccine news stories to sound credible while they spew random scary paranoia-generated vax-nonsense into the mix. And then some famous idiot like Jenny McCarthy picks up the banner and tells millions of uninformed parents how scary and dangerous vaccines are while saying how any good parent would eagerly choose measles over autism. Which is a load of crap. It is a completely fraudulent implication that choosing to vaccinate is a choice about autism. It is a fraudulent and DEADLY implication that a parent who vaccinates is a bad parent risking giving their child autism.

You kinda skipped a few steps in your story. In particular you skipped the step WHERE CHILDREN STARTED DYING.
And we're not even talking about anti-vaxxers killing their own children, which would be bad enough. We're talking about anti-vaxxers killing other people's children. We're talking about actual disease outbreaks among anti-vaxxers, who then infect someone else's 1 month old infant. You can't vaccinate a 1 month old baby, their immune system isn't developed enough yet and the vaccine isn't effective yet. We're talking actual infant corpse, dead of vaccine-preventable-disease. Not to mention any cases resulting in brain damage, deafness, blindness, infertility, or other sever complications.

But, I guess you're right..... it's not literally murder by the legal definition. Perhaps manslaughter would be a more appropriate term? Reckless endangerment and disregard for life resulting in someone's death. I'm only half joking there. There are severe problems with trying to make people criminally liable for something like that, but they sure as hell are morally responsible. People DIE from this antivax bullshit. Antivaxxers are morally culpable for causing deaths or catastrophic injury to innocent bystanders, including other people's vulnerable infants.

There's good reason that smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella were targeted for world vaccination. We've had a generation of people growing up in a world essentially free of these diseases, and people are blissfully unaware of just how painful, horrific, or fatal the outcome can be for a percentage of the people who contract them.

You mean 6 shots. The triple vaccine is 2 shots, giving them separately requires 6 shots.

First, lets just rationally examine the merits of that plan.
We have thirty years record of probably a billion+ people and a gargantuan body of research establishing the triple vaccine is extremely safe and and highly effective. We have only limited study and limited track record on the safety and efficacy of a 6 shot program, and essentially zero basis on the ordering or timing of such a program.

What we do have is an extensive record that vaccination programs suffer skyrocketing failure rates as the number of doctor visits and injections increases. Whether it is due to poverty, apathy, forgetfulness, children begging their parents to avoid the needle, or whatever, vaccinations programs fall into catastrophic collapse because too much of the population fail to reach each increasing doctor visit or injection.

Some children aren't bothered by needles while others escalate the fear and pain to almost traumatic levels, but in any case it's hardly in the child's best interest to subject them to it three times more than necessary.

It's certainly not in the child's best interest to subject them to three times as much pain, three times as much bleeding, three times as much risk of infection from the puncture. And while the risk of adverse reaction is negligible... vastly lower than the risk of adverse reaction of eating a banana or any other food... it's still contrary to the child's interest to multiply the risk of an adverse reaction.

Splitting vaccination into 6 shots leaves the children vulnerable to two-out-of-three diseases during the delay period. (What delay period anyway? A day? A week? A month? 6 months? A year? There's no answer on that because this is all a vacuous hear-say "fix" for an urban legend nonexistent problem.)

The only "other side of the argument" is parents who are going to harm their children out of fear of an urban legend. Given a choice between harming children by not vaccinating them at all, or harming children with an untested regimen involving three times the pain and three times the skin punctures and multiplied risk of adverse reaction, well...... an untested vaccination regimen with a multiplied suffering and multiplied negligible-risk is vastly better than the dangers of going unvaccinated.

As for single vaccines they are around, although it seems that for one of the three diseases the most effective version is only available from Merck and only in the triple vaccine. The others are known to be less effective and aren't approved in all countries. I guess it would be a good thing if Merck offered all three as single vaccines if it would reduce the harm being done by vax-paranoid parents. And if Merck doesn't want to do that, well every country has health-and-public-safety clauses to their intellectual property laws and they could take the extremely extraordinary step of issuing an exemption allowing other companies to manufacture single vaccines. Or counties could just plain invoke health and public safety and make the triple vaccine mandatory, and simply ignore the anti-vax nonsense the same way we ignore the fluoridation paranoid conspiracy theory nutters.

No, someone TOLD your wife that there was a woman's jacket.

And after that person was shown to be LYING about it, your wife just spiraled deeper into paranoid jealousy and started following an internet psychic who tells her details about the (fictional) woman you're sleeping with. And then your wife kidnaps the kids and takes them to hide out in cabin in the woods, refusing to take the kids for regular checkups at the doctor because she's afraid you and the (fictional) woman you're sleeping with are planning to sue for sole custody of the kids.

-

<Jenny McCarthy>
My child didn't eat a tuna steak 5 minutes before he was diagnosed with autism!
</Jenny McCarthy>

-

It seems there's a portion of the population that will compulsively latch onto hear-say and pseudoscience nonsense and conspiracy theories, no matter what we do. Maybe we should just accept that. Just deal with it and make the best of things.

I've got this totally scientific evidence that autism is caused by the ink in lottery tickets. The ink doesn't affect adults, but the chemicals stick to your fingers. Then when you touch your kids the chemicals get absorbed through their skin and disrupt their developing brains. My kid was perfectly healthy one morning, and at a routine checkup that afternoon my child was diagnosed with autism! And the only thing that happened in between was that I bought lottery tickets and hugged by child! You can't imagine how devastating that is to a parent, unless of course you're a parent who bought a lottery ticket and immediately had their child diagnosed with autism.

Have the so-called "scientists" tested the lottery ticket ink? HELL NO! The government rakes in millions of dollars on lottery tickets! Scientists all want grant money (our money taken in taxes!) to do their research. And is the government going to give them money if the government doesn't like the results of that research! OF COURSE the scientists are going to be biased and tow the government line.

I am not anti-lottery-tickets.
I just want to reduce the ink and reduce the toxins. Lottery tickets are fine when the government proves that that new ink ensures no children will get autism.
If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want their kid to have autism, or whether they'd choose to pass up on a lousy lottery ticket, well duh they'll pass up on the lousy lottery ticket.

What parent would ever knowingly risk giving their child autism? It's unthinkable! It's just not worth the risk.

-

Because the percentage of scientists who say anti-vax is nonsense is within a rounding error of 100%,
and because the percentage of scientists who say global warming is real and serious is within a rounding error of 100%.

(Not that I know jack squat about James Cameron's movie, but the question was why one celebrity voice would be credible while another would not be. A celebrity who doesn't speak French, but who accurately recites a French dictionary, is backed by the full credibility of that dictionary.)

-

The tone was intended to be playfully humorous. I called you a "dick" for the sole purpose of invoking the "right and a dick" thing in a self-referential manner. "Whistling innocently" was my best effort to hang a guilty-of-mischief hat on it.

C'est la vie, c'est la internet.

-

Calling people "overbearing assholes" makes you a total dick.

::whistles innocently and wanders away::

-

I know nothing about the merits (or lack of merits) of a "European schedule" vs any other schedule, but reading your post all I can think is...

People are screaming that flowers attract fairies and fairies are eating children's brains, to which you reply:
"Just plant European bushes outside the schools. European flowers don't attract fairies."

-

Apocalypse in current usage means the end of the world. By that definition - no skill will be 'Apocalypse Useful' - because no one will be around in the aftermath of the end of time (with the possible exception of an intrepid band of our great grandchildren who might figure out how to jump between multiple universe branes at the precise moment of the 'big rip' - a very remote possibility imho).

Really what we are talking about are events that while devastating, are short of the level of destruction needed to end the world. The very nature of that definition means that there will be locations that are not directly impacted by whatever happened. The most key struggle would come from dependency on things that moved by long distance transport; various foods, fuels, technology, and other manufactured goods. As a result, local replacements would have to be found and developed.

In those areas harder hit - it would be very bad, if not impossible to survive after the initial event. I can see migrations of people from these 'hot zones' to more habitable areas. Refugees might put too much pressure on less impacted areas - causing a crisis in those areas. The first few years after the event might be very chaotic due to these population pressures and migrations. The very best way to avoid a humanitarian disaster would be to make sure all of the surviving zones have good communications - and plans in place for relocating and organizing the influx of survivors into their communities. I think you would also want to move as quickly as possible to restore technology to society - maybe not in the exact forms that we are used to - but restoration just the same. Having running water, food, medicines, heating and cooling, and energy in general are critical to sustaining life. As a result, I think all disciplines will be useful to society in that situation in one way or another. One example: artists and story tellers would be useful in bringing entertainment and beauty into the lives of the survivor communities - and might be very important in keeping human knowledge alive until information systems can once again be restored. Ultimately, people would be so hard pressed to survive that it would quickly become apparent that the survivors will do better by banding together rather than fighting among themselves.

Overall - I think if the event was large enough to depopulate the world significantly, I think the survivors would be very busy indeed, with little time or energy to waste of the staples of post-apocalyptic fiction: warlords, societal breakdown, and descent of our humanity to that of the animals, leading us to prey upon our fellow man. While there may be a few sociopaths who try to benefit from the situation, I expect the rest of us to quickly control that. Essentially, humanity has lived through these sorts of things in the past, and I am sure we would make do and get on with living in the aftermath of whatever mother nature sends our way again.

Why not use a mass transit service like subway or tram?

I suspect you meant that tongue-in-cheek, but if not...

The nearest subway stop to me: 213 miles.
The nearest passenger train stop: 90 miles.
The nearest bus stop? 24 miles.

Hell, the nearest taxi service won't even come to my house unless I prepay by credit card.

And although you could fairly say that I live in the middle of nowhere, I actually live in a fairly densely populated region of the country, just not inside an actual city. The US just plain has fuck-all for realistic public transportation.

Sure, management wouldn't let him make the change and that is bad.

With this going so high that congress dragged the CEO in to lie to them that this involved anything more than "cheaper to let you die", by naming these two engineers, GM has just given them the power to completely ruin the company.

"We tried to do the right thing and management thwarted us at every turn". Done in one, the CEO just perjured herself before congress, and the class action liability suits put GM (back) into bankruptcy (where they belong).

Unfortunately in this case, engineers tend to have too strong of a "boyscout" streak in them, and the ones implicated here will probably just do their best to ignore the fact that GM just threw them under the bus for following orders.

Or put another way - I don't work in an industry that seriously puts people's lives in danger, and legal would goose-step me out of the goddamned building before they let me do something like GM claims these two engineers did "on their own". So an entire multinational supply and manufacturing chain of command just quietly went along with the whims of two peons that massively violated protocol? Bullshit.

I don't know about California, but in Oklahoma a speeding ticket is going to cost you at least $200. If you avoid two tickets a year, it would pay for itself in 12.5 years.

No one really cares about the tickets themselves. For someone making $200k a year, they would gladly pay $200 every week for the right to zip through crawling traffic.

The real problem comes from getting "points" and the eventual loss of your license. And once that happens, you have drive like a frickin' choirboy or they start giving out real punishments, like spending weekends in a cage (c'mon, let's not pretend people actually stop driving when they lose their license - In 99% of the US, "not driving" amounts to a sentence of death-by-life-on-welfare).

For some reason, Windows admins have been trained to reboot immediately when things don't work well rather than to figure out why something is failing.

Because in the Windows world, I usually don't have the luxury of digging into the kernel's or driver's source code to figure out exactly why it has stopped behaving correctly. If it doesn't log any errors, doesn't export any useful diagnostic messages, doesn't outright crash on reproducible conditions, and just stops working "right", your avenues of further inquiry get very very ugly, very fast.

I can reboot a VM in well under a minute. For any nontrivial problem that happens roughly twice a month and a reboot makes it go away, it would take twenty years of rebooting to justify spending an entire eight hour day diagnosing the root cause.

And I say that as someone who (in the Linux world) has written his own kernel patches to work around buggy hardware. In Windows, just not worth the time; because even if you do successfully diagnose the problem, you may well have no ability to correct it.

I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.

The bigger problem I see with teaching politicians to code comes from their comprehension of boolean logic. In computer science, we constantly evaluate the truth of various simple expressions. In politics, their entire career depends on their ability to obfuscate the truth of insanely complex issues in such a way as to make them look true (or false) based on the interest of their highest bidder. ;)

More seriously, though, I have to agree with Bloomberg. Not everyone can code, and of those who have the raw capacity to learn it, many of them would hate actually doing it. Coding requires going into an almost trancelike state for hours at a time, sitting motionless while visualizing the flow of data through complex control structures and eventually interacting with some form of I/O. You try to stick a traditional manual laborer (I mean that in the good way - The kind of guy who enjoys nothing more than an honest day's hard work) into that seat for ten hours, and watch him slowly go crazy.

Personally, I find it just hilarious that TFA fails to recognize two points:

First, that our inability to live long enough to win a prize that takes a 150 year career directly highlights a domain of science that we still have some pretty amazing leaps left to take.

And second, that a NatGeo author of all people would dare to write about another discipline running out of material - How many indigenous tribes do you have left to exploit for stories, NG? And will you do the honorable thing and close up shop when you finally run out, or will you just turn into yet another travel-n'-tourism rag? ;)


We can talk about this again when a human born on Earth can someday physically walk on another habitable planet. I can think of three completely-physically-possible ways to accomplish that, without even giving it much thought: Living forever (with enough energy and the right tools, we can repair anything); near-infinite free energy (fusion) combined with time dilation, uploading your consciousness to a clone made, at the receiving end, from your own digitized and transmitted DNA. Any combination of just those alone would completely reshape human existence, and don't even require getting into the "maybe but probably not" methods like FTL travel or wormholes.

This really doesn't take much effort, you poor uncreative bastard (not you, parent poster - the TFA author). Pick something you can't do that the laws of physics don't outright ban (and even some of those might have a way to "bend" them, if not outright break them). Pick something obvious we have almost no understanding of - gravity; what your dog really wants for dinner; the size of the universe (the Hubble Radius merely describes our causal universe - We actually can't tell whether or not we live in an infinite universe); how to feed everyone in a world that throws away more food than it actually needs; fuckin' magnets (as Hofstadter said, "greenness dissolves" - You can't explain macroscopic effects with turtles all the way down); why hot models like ugly singers; what "causes" radioactive decay; why writers in a dying genre feel the need to prove their inadequacy in other domains of knowledge - And you'll have a breakthrough just waiting to happen.

a bog-standard usb/spdif dongle that I own and use from time to time won't work on win7/64. no driver on earth for it. 32bit, yes. 64, no.

So to keep a $30 USB audio dongle working, you plan to forgo all the advantages that come with more than 4GB of RAM?

And you realize, of course, that within the next year or two you'll start seeing more "can't live without it" software no longer releasing 32bit builds?


throwing away working hardware is a sin.

Ever heard of the Sunk Cost fallacy?