Aggressive vaccinations result in higher incidence of auto-immune diseases
Perhaps this is a case of citation needed? I think it has been established that there are acute autoimmune reactions to vaccine (e.g. Guillain-Barre Syndrome/AIPD), but I've had some difficulty verifying that there is a consensus that vaccines are a long term autoimmune disease risk factor. You do make a good plausibility argument (consistent with the molecular mimicry model), so I would be willing to believe if it there were some studies done.
Really, that is the truth right there: an imperfect law is much better than no law
While I appreciate that you're trying to point out that no formal legal system can ever deal with the complexity of civilization (true), I'm not sure that this follows that these types of very simple laws are appropriate. The law (and the legal process) specifies an algorithm for society to handle these complexities, and - frankly - laws of the type "If you are of age X, you may do Y; otherwise not" are horrible in that they have (in my experience, anyway) pretty high false negative rates (a younger person being restricted incommensurate with the ability). A more effective algorithm would be to authorize some group (spreading power away from individual assholes) to determine the capacity of specific minors thus removing some of the obvious failures of the law.
I'm not saying this is the end-all solution for this, but I'm not exactly a legal scholar and even I see obvious ways to craft better legislation. We pay our legislators enough -- demand better quality!
Dear AC, perhaps we are using different definitions of "obsession." Here's mine: when something cannot possibly benefit your life in any measurable way whatsoever, and you devote energy to pursuing it anyway, this is something of an obsession.
Good point, but I think you might get more mileage out of your definition by framing it in terms like the DSM-IV might: an obsession is an interest that has become maladaptive. (No, I didn't go look it up, but it feels to me like the appropriate spirit.) In this way you might be able to make a distinction between people who have an interest in the social affairs of a subset of humans who interact in strange ways (w.r.t. the rest of human society) and those who have become so interested that it interferes with the conduct of their own lives.
Interesting other points though.
Of course I think most of us who HAVE gone to college realize that's not really the point. College is a chance to be a kid for 4 more years, scoring with women, and hopefully meet your future wife or husband. The reason people remember their alma maters so fondly is because it was the last time they lived without any responsibility.
I guess I can't relate to this. When I went to college, I took the maximum allowable (or more) credits per semester and spent most of my free time either in labs, working on coursework or working on personal projects that extended my knowledge. That's not to say I didn't have some free time to do other things, but I would never describe the process as primarily a chance to do any of the things you listed. If you do it right, you can end up with enough specialized knowledge to avoid becoming stuck in a job you don't enjoy and can pursue a line of work closely in line with your passions.
Another thing I don't understand is how anyone could take a pill that spends more then half of the tv commercial talking about how many side effects there are and that rare occasional deaths can occur. WTF?
Every drug has side effects, some more noticeable than others. The simple fact is that we don't understand human biology well enough to predict or prevent all side effects while preserving the mechanism of action of the drug. As in engineering, it is a trade off: you exchange symptomatic and pathophysiologic relief for less severe symptoms due to adverse reactions to the drug. When adverse reaction to drugs exceeds the relief granted by them, they're typically discontinued on a patient-by-patient basis. The only way to avoid all side effects is stop taking drugs until human biology advances far enough to control for them all which will never occur in our lifetime.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin