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Comment Re:Congress Sucks (Score 1) 858

Piss off the doctors and medical industry, and either the docs will retire early, change career path, while disincentivizing the young from entering the field.

See France for an illustration. French doctors and nurses were on strike in mid-november over government's price controls. At the same time we have what many call "medical deserts", zones where actual medical care is far away and in short supply. But, hey, at least it's the gubn'mint paying in our place... in exchange for a third of our salary.

Comment Re:Idiot (Score 3, Insightful) 513

Assuming the person arrested is not guilty, it could just be a false positive match. DNA tests are not 100% precise, in fact I read they are 99.7% precise only, resulting in approximately 1-in-300 errors, so in any wide-ranging tests with thousands of different DNAs all coming from the same area (meaning most of them had a lot of common ancestors across them) it was almost bound to happen. Imagine the uproar if TWO 100% matches had been found (and I do not mean homozygote twins) !

Note that roughly 1 in 10-15 person has more than one set of DNA, through chimerism - rare - or plain mosaicism - which is much more common than usually thought: that's part of how you can get "surprising" results of >10% paternity tests turning out negative in countries where those tests are sold over the counter. There are documented cases of botched criminal cases due to this, the most famous being Linda "I'm my own twin" Fairchild's.

And if he IS guilty then it may be one way to work up doubt into a future jury, using precisely those arguments. So, it's not necessarily idiotic.

Comment Re:should be CFA not TSA (Score 2) 134

how does an agency exist/expand/get funding without demonstrating any results whatsoever?

That's because you fail to understand what the real objectives of this agency are, and what results are actually evaluated.

If an agency has its funding consistently increased, if its antics and public failures are conveniently dismissed or stamped out, and if many ambitious, politically-influent people fight and rush to get a high-responsibility mandate in this agency, then it means it is very successful in providing the results that whoever is funding it, was hoping it'd produce.

Consider that the very act of spending taxpayers' money could in itself very well be the intended result sought after. Providing high-paying, low-effort job opportunities for politicaly-introduced young party cadre members, is another obvious one.

Comment Re:I'm from the government and I'm here to help yo (Score 1) 198

A single, super-intelligent person doesn't need other people, so by virtue they have no interest in petty things and can be better leaders.

Ruling over other people's lives is one of the most petty thing one can spend time doing, which is why there can be no good leader, ever. Life is nonsensical, obsessing over others' lives is nonsense squared.

Also, it's painfully obvious you're not a parent if you think you can lord it over your kid any way you think fit. A parent can have over his or her kids nowhere near the slightest approximation of the power even a small city mayor holds over his or her fellow citizens. Kids will seize authority over themselves from you bit by bit without question or notice as soon as they deem themselves ready for it - yes, whether they really are or not - and starting as early as a few months of age.

Comment democracy != elections (Score 1) 1576

In a proper democratic system, all votes should be given equal weight.

Democracy has little to do with elections.

Election is a monarchic or rather an aristocratic process, historically it is the method by which peers of the realm select one among themselves to rule as king. The ancient greeks who defined the very word 'democracy' held no election for public offices, they only had elections for the top military mandates and IIRC Socrates explicitly lambasted elections as being aristocratic in nature. Compare that to the fact that all the main european monarchic dynasties of the middle-age started with an election: Pepin the short was elected king of the Franks, establishing the Carolingian dynasty that assumed the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, Hughes Capet was elected king of France and founded the long Capetian dynasty of french kings. Conrad of Franconia was elected king and basically established the kingdom of Germany, Arnulf of Carinthia was elected king of eastern Francia (which covered pretty much the whole of eastern Europe), etc. In most of eastern Europe, kings succceeded each other through election, for centuries. Even the title of emperor of the Holy Germanic Empire was attributed through election (with quite the same campaigning, mudslinging and corruption going on as in nowaday's elections).

Democracy stands for 'the people themselves manage the institutions and hold the final authority', whereas an election means pretty much the opposite, as it's a method for choosing one person to manage institutions himself and hold that public power and authority over everyone else.

Like most of your contemporaries you have no clear idea of what democracy actually looks and feels like, my guess is you most probably aren't familiar with concepts such a emergence and legal polycentrism, or their foremost place in the history of civilisation.

Comment I, for one, long for more dissent (Score 2) 1160

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that 'when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.'

Not only can freedom to provoke and humiliate others' values and beliefs be protected, I'll raise it one notch and affirm it *must* be protected, for the sake of mankind's mind health.

I'm constantly amazed to see so many "famous" or "influent" people devise that being famous or influent implies, somehow, that they more than anyone else should not tread onto other people's convictions, offend or openly criticize the many widespread values and beliefs held all over the world. Quite the opposite, I would have thought the more people lend an ear to you, the higher your moral duty to voice out your mind and dish out demolition of common reality-walls, for the sake of human thought.

At every level of being, opinions and decisions are formed through constant dissent, even down to the individual neuron's level, war of words and contradicting thoughts stamping each other out, fighting again and again with reason, passion, humor, eck even contempt or guilt, all this for a flimsy supremacy: this is how our minds work. Dissent is our natural mode of operation. And as a corollary, political correctness, by suppressing initiative and blunting internal dissent so as not to confront other people's own thoughts is a double mistake: it throws a wrench into your own gears of thinking, and leaves your fellow humans wading in what you earnestly believe is wrong - not a nice thing to do, when you think about it. This is what mankind has been doing so intently as of late, and it needs to stop (bashing itself on the mind so hard).

Comment Re:Why is the Obama administration objecting ? (Score 4, Informative) 308

Hmm no. The study done by Seralini, when analysed properly, shows that rats of the specific strain used during the trials developped the normal, expected proportion of tumors (which is 2 to 8 per group of 10 individuals), whether they were fed GMO, Roundup, both, or non-GMO corn. The author of this study mistakenly concluded that there was an effect, whereas his results were actually statistically insignificant.

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