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Are you one of those people who would have ridiculed anyone claiming the Government can "listen to all of our phone calls any time they want" as a conspiracy theorist?

If you were actually knowledgeable about the topic, you would know that vaccination rates in the US are extremely high -- among the highest in the world -- and are not dropping. There is zero danger of polio making a comeback.

Most "anti-vaxxers" (all?) I know have their kids vaccinated against polio. If you decline the flu shot (which, by the way, does not undergo the safety assurances that most vaccines must. It can't: there's not enough time to get it on the market before it's needed) then you are an "anti-vaxxer" even if all the rest are administered on schedule. I call bullshit. Strawman fallacy.

Probably no-one will get chickenpox or pertussis and nobody is going to change their minds of vaccinations. Those facilities had perfectly normal vaccination rates last year, and probably will this year as well once the records are fully updated.

You have hit the nail upon the head. For people who believe this, California is probably second only to New York in places to stay away from. It certainly is to me, for this reason.

I don't know, but if want I'd be happy to talk with you about the experience. :)

I started off doing part-time classes at a local community college, finished it off with 2 years at a 4-year school, and went directly into med school.

It's a lot of work and way way more stress than I ever imagined it would be, but it wasn't hard to get in. Lots of medical schools, especially osteopathic schools, welcome nontraditional students, and frankly if you do the prep work the MCAT isn't that bad.

If you have an eye on med school, start accumulating experience in the medical field early on. EMT training isn't hard to get and a couple of years doing EMT work (heck, you can do EMT training and work in the evenings and not interfere with a full-time job) will prepare you tremendously. I didn't do that, and it would have helped during admissions and would help a lot with the educational experience.

If I'm not mistaken, you just compared a community of homeschoolers to a community of self-mutilators. That's amazing.

There's really nothing that separates reddit from any other online forum, except that it brings so many disparate viewpoints under a single login and domain. Slashdot is no less of an echo chamber lined with groupthink and foolishness.

1) Mum and dad don't have to be teachers. 1-on-1 instruction is so much superior to classroom education that there is really no comparison.

2) Trying to emulate a school environment at home is a recipe for disaster. That's not how it works, and that's not how it should work.

3) All of those are quickly learned upon entrance to college, or during the large quantities of socialization that homeschooled families tend to be very careful to procure for their children. Homeschoolers actually tend to be considerably better socialized than their public school peers. However, dropping a homeschooled child into the wolfpack of public school is a recipe for disaster.

4) Exactly right. Thus, unschooling. http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Unschooling-The-Case-for-Setting-Your-Kids-Into-the-Wild.html It works very well, if the parents can get their head around that kind of freedom.

5) I don't know what your experience was but forced separation from parents is traumatic. Of course, once children hit puberty, they tend to break free on their own, thus handling the overly-attached problem.

Sorry your experience was bad. Most are not like that.

Slashdot is a rough place to post this. Check out reddit.com/r/homeschooling for a more knowledgeable community, but there are a TON of resources to help you figure this out if it is something you are interested in.

I don't know of anyone doing statistical work on homeschoolers. It would be helpful, but the fact is that homeschoolers tend to integrate very well in society. It's not as if there is a magical 3 percent that stand out all the time for you to notice.

I only know of anecdotal material. I am one of those. I was homeschooled K-12 and am now in medical school (as a nontraditional student, after having worked as a programmer for 10 years). My homeschooling experience was actually very difficult, but it did prepare me for working hard in the world.

I do want to address the point of socialization, however. By and large, homeschoolers are VASTLY better socialized than public schooled children. The reason for this is simple. Unlike public school, where children largely interact with teachers and same-aged peers, homeschooled children interact with a great swath of society from a young age. (There are occasional shut-in familes, but they are rare and you obviously would not be one of them.) Homeschooling is absolutely not a question of academics vs. socialization. Homeschoolers get both.

However, there is a different balance to strike. Your time. Homeschooling is a very serious commitment, particularly in time. This is the part that will get you.

As for your wife letting go, both boys and girls grow up more emotionally mature and resilient if they remain close to their parents until puberty. This translates to better socialization, better mental health, and better emotional capacities through life. So it might not be a bad thing.

...considering that Android -- at its core -- is a form of Linux.

Chocolate consumption is correlated with a nice range of positive clinical effects. It doesn't matter if someone figures out one proposed mechanism is invalid, because the stuff still works. Just because we might still be learning *why* something works does not invalidate the effect at all.

How about a metal/plastic hybrid? Metal chamber, metal barrel, plastic frame and mechanism? Because that has already been made.

Even if we assume that firearms need to be made of metal, 3D-printing of metal is coming down in price. It'll be a while, but it will happen eventually.

As for your statement about enabling the next Continental Army...that's not the point. The point of plastic guns is to enable someone to obtain a higher quality firearm with a reasonable degree of success. (Also to defeat the idea of "gun free zones.")

Yes but anyone (literally, anyone) can order an upper from the Internet and have it shipped to their door.

If you look around, there are doctors who will let you take home your original patient record. Just because you haven't tried to do this doesn't mean it is impossible.

How can I say this? Because my doctor will do this for any cash-paying patient who asks.

It may be unscientific to come to that kind of conclusion based on an n=16 study.

However, what this study DOES show is that the existing paradigm of saturated fat == heart disease ought to be questioned and thoroughly re-examined. Frankly, if I had metabolic syndrome, I'd be experimenting on myself the moment I heard about this.

According to Dr. Paul, the bill didn't go far enough (I agree). It also extended the PATRIOT act. Are you really led around that easily, to think that helping to kill this bill somehow makes him an authoritarian stooge?

Failure to pass this bill means we'll get another chance. The pressure is on. Once they pass a bill, nobody is going to want to pass another one for a while, so the first one has to get it right. The ACA is an example of a bill that was slammed through, and got a lot of things wrong. Let's not do the same thing with limiting the NSA.

Also, Rand Paul does not claim to be a libertarian, and if you actually knew anything about libertarians you should have known that libertarians tend to give him a giant stink-eye.