"sources" say, anyway.

Tissue culture is more expensive than mice in many cases. I'm not sure circulatory systems are well modeled in tissue culture yet anyway. So few agencies would be willing to fund it, they'd say "why don't you just do it in mice." At least, before this study.

Undoubtedly an extremely small fraction of the number of cases in which the opposite happens: drug shows promise in cell culture or mouse trials, has no effect in humans or is toxic.

Any volunteers to have doctors intentionally give you blood poisoning, then take experimental drugs to cure it? Keep in mind that a quarter of those TREATED for sepsis will die, and naturally you wouldn't be able to take other treatments or that would cloud the results. So you'll die of sepsis, unless the drugs they're testing kills you first.

Anyone volunteering, you've clearly got some problems and would be unsuitable to study anyway. And forcing people to participate in the research and letting them die has its own problems.

Researchers already knew that mice models were far from perfect. Anyone paying any attention to biomedical research knows that if some amazing cure is demonstrated in mice, it will likely never be heard of again since it didn't pan out. It's important to realize if one hadn't already that mice weren't perfect models for humans, but it's also important to realize that drug testing in mice IS necessary.

Does the "how" really matter? Money has always and will always find influence in politics. You can spend your entire life fighting to close loopholes to try to keep it out, but there will always be more, and new ones opening up. And if you actually close one, your chances of having enough influence to close another one will vanish.

Anyway, lobbyist money only succeeds in the presence of public apathy. If the voters don't give a shit that US businesses are writing their laws, no law concerning lobbyists is going to keep the businesses from doing so.

And do you see people coming up with such passwords often?

Hmm... you're familiar with most banking online systems?

You almost had me convinced to make a super easy bank password. Nice try, identity thief!

You're playing with semantics. You're taking good parts. If you say social security isn't needed, then lead by example and do without it.

You're not being forced to take the social security payments.

Please read the last part of my one-line post. You have a good case to make the claim that you're forced to pay it, and thus are not a hypocrite. I covered that.

The Church has a long history of finding their way around such inconsistencies. The books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John clearly aren't identical, yet somehow they're all said to be true. and Luke appear to contradict each other on Joseph's lineage for example.

I'm not clear on the theology behind it, but I'm guessing it's something along the lines of he speaks for God, when he does that he's infallible as God is infallible. I know the pope does not always invoke infallibility. In other words, he only maintains that he can't be wrong when he says he can't be wrong.

Yes, it is goofy, but it's not quite as simple as you're suggesting.

Because someone submitted it and it didn't get rejected in "firehose" or by an editor.

Let me pose my own question: did you do anything to keep it off of slashdot?

Followup question assuming you're in the US: Do you vote in political primaries?

Perhaps eldavojohn meant that such people were the cause of a transition to atheism but not the basis for his continued atheism. "I don't know if God exists, but the people who claim to be speaking on his behalf are clearly wrong or at least insane" is probably a common thought that leads one to initially reject a theology, or never take one up in the first place.

Either that or Eldavojohn was making a minor hyperbole. Or eldavojohn's beliefs aren't purely logical, like most of us.

If you speak out against something then partake of it, you're still undermining your own credibility unless you have a damn good reason why you're forced to.

Without being familiar with Ayn Rand, I'd guess it was the other things she said beyond "Work in your own self interest." She said more than that one line, right?

The second and third criteria seem a bit artificial. Why not just cost vs benefit? On economics, did you mean factoring in externalized costs? If one were to demonstrate that switching to nuclear from coal would save more money from having to deal with climate change than we'd save by sticking with coal, then the smart move to make would be to switch, unless you're a coal fired power plant owner or remarkably short-sighted. Efficiency makes even less sense to me if you're talking in terms of energy production only. If solar is a fraction of the efficiency but can still meet our needs and is the better alternative, then we should switch.