The FDA disagrees, and so does the evidence. And there are a whole lot of areas where pharmacogenetics is starting to have an impact on treatment. In any case, pharmacogenetics is a subset of pharmacogenomics; for example, as I mentioned in another comment, the lab where I work is working on expression-based tests for prediction of altitude sickness and setting up drug trials.

The clinical trials framework that's evolved over the decades isn't really equipped to deal with personalized medicine, but that's starting to change. Where I work, we're starting to understand the genomic basis of altitude sickness and putting together treatment trials on that basis. This is an area where the potential market is pretty large, of course, and for rare diseases that affect small numbers of people it's going to be harder, but if we can develop a generally accepted body of protocols for individualized trials then it should be possible to apply this to smaller groups as time goes by.

- absolutely. The rich ARE paying for EVERYTHING. The businesses are creating all of the products you use, they pay all of the salaries people get (including government salaries, which is money taken away from businesses and from salaries of private industry workers, who get paid by businesses owned by... not the poor, let's be clear on this.)

The rich are creating all of the products, paying all of the salaries, paying all of the taxes. The difference is: in a free society this happens through normal voluntary market participation.

What you are proposing is use of majority of the crowd, which directs the government violence at the few people that are richer than the rest and you think that this is a way to put a price on "stable and progressive civilisation". Well, you are also factually WRONG on that. Before 1913, before income taxes, before IRS, before 99% of all business regulations, before 99% of all that government is doing today the rich were paying for everything and the USA economy was GROWING.

Today, when the government is 100 times larger, enormously more expensive, where business regulations, income taxes, inflation are incalculable basically, where is the society going? The same drain that the economy is going. And AFAIC this is a RIGHTEOUS THING, a good thing, the correct, though unfortunate thing. I am against violence and those who use government violence to destroy individual freedoms (in order to ROB the rich), they should have to suffer all of the consequences of their actions and I welcome this effect, hopefully this will fix the problem, as this coming level of suffering will eventually either help to fix the problem of this violence or it will annihilate this "progressive" civilisation, and if that happens, then good, that's where that particular civilisation belongs for not being civilised enough not to steal from people, not to oppress individuals.

There is nothing stable about what you are proposing and there is nothing good about that type of 'progressive'.

Urgh. Good point.

I'll bet there's a model that could take all stuff this into account, and sufficient data to estimate the parameters. But trying to figure out what that would be feels too much like work.

So we have records of about, what, eight thousand mass extinctions? Wow, I had no idea. ;)

Okay, makes sense. So we probably already have the data available to do a pretty good analysis of impact periodicity.

I understand why they're getting a weak signal here on Earth, where most craters will have long since been erased by erosion and surface remodeling. But I'll bet we could get a much stronger signal from the Moon, particularly the far side. Do we have the ability to get dates for craters there from orbiting probes, or is that something we'd have to collect physical samples to do?

Theorems and theories are two different things. You're quite right, that proving a theorem requires a well-defined set of axioms; the natural world, unfortunately, doesn't provide us with such axioms*, which is why we have to use theories to describe it.

*Well, maybe. "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" argues that maybe there is some axiomatic Truth at the basis of reality. But if so, we have no idea what it is yet, and anyone who tells you they know is lying.

Ah, I see you've recently discovered a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies. Come back when you learn enough to understand what the bullet points actually mean.

Very true. You do, however, frequently hear claims along the lines of "Warmists say it's all 'settled science!' Stupid warmists, nothing is ever settled in science!" This article does an excellent job of addressing that particular straw man.

Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.

And claiming that the other side is claiming "the topic is settled" is almost always a strawman.

Nice job of concealing your ideological looniness until the end of the post.

In my mid-40s, and having been active online since my teens, I understand that using a pseudonym is no guarantee of privacy.