What a horrible example of how not to behave as a decent human being.
Agreed. Abelson should be ashamed of himself.
Pack it in you eugenics morons! We are on to your game!
I sense irritation and a vague sense of intellectual superiority...
Woah... James Randi, here I come!
Perhaps a few of the less competent might opt for it but us race car drivers will never stand for it.
I tend to find that people who define themselves as the latter category are more or less also in the former category. Offense is not the best defense when driving.
Capitalism requires that increased productivity should cause increased wages. When the 10 Luddites are replaced by a machine (that costs the same as paying 4 Luddites) and 1 Luddite, does the remaining Luddite's pay increase 10 fold, 4 fold, or 2 fold? Where does the money go? This is the riddle of the robot menace, and why Capitalism can't solve the problem by itself.
The remaining worker's pay remains the same, and the difference is split between the owners of the capital (the machines), the makers of the capital, and lowered costs to the consumers of the end product. The only reason the worker's pay would increase would be if the supply of workers was constrained (e.g. by an increased skills requirement).
I'm not sure where you learned economics, but basic supply and demand applies to the labor market too.
This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?
You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.
Great read.
Due to a lack of regulatory oversight for homeopathic remedies, that's probably never going to happen.
Why? Science doesn't require the government to happen. Real pharmaceutical companies do studies of the viability of the products long before they reach the stage where they are ready to do testing for regulatory purposes.
As to useful medicines, read a basic biochemistry textbook for 2nd year. Thousands of citations in there, which I could take and link to the papers they're based on.
Put up, or shut up. Find just one paper to demonstrate positive effects of homeopathy in a statistically significant group that shows better than placebo applications. No biochemistry textbook is going to show that magical shaky water has effects that real chemicals do.
It doesn't always have to be better than a placebo to work.
Yes, it does. If it does worse than the placebo effect, then it is hurting the patient, and the placebo effect is only disguising this fact.
Homeopathy usually works on the placebo effect. That doesn't mean it doesn't work. Quite the opposite.
Yes, it does mean that it doesn't work. If you gave someone distilled water, told them it was a homeopathic cure, and it had the same effect, then homeopathy doesn't actually do anything, because it's not the "medicine" that's having the effect. That's what the placebo effect is used for -- to eliminate non-medicine effects in judging the value of a medicine.
But with infinite dilution side effects should be diluted infinitely to.
If that were the case, then the main effect would also be diluted infinitely (i.e. reduced to zero) too. Which is what actually happens with homeopathy, because it's utter nonsense.
That said, some homeopathic remedies have proven useful in medical research into cures.
Citation, please. The fundamental theory of homeopathy is unsound and violates fundamental physics. If you have a study with a statistically significant population that shows statistically significant improvements over a placebo, then please put the authors in touch with James Randi, who has offered $1 million to anyone who can prove it to work.
The problem is the dosage levels normally used are insufficient to cause that changes claimed.
At higher dosages, homeopathy stops being homeopathy and starts being herbalism. That's a whole different kettle of fish.
It's more that you *have* to choose disease risks. This isn't engineering a baby's genome from scratch -- it's just a matching system between potential gametes.
For example, if you're a woman looking to have a child via artificial insemination, then this system will let you profile the risks and rewards of using different donor sperm with your own eggs. All of these genomes (and your own) carry defective genes. So, do you want the donor with a high IQ and arthritis or the one with good looks and a high risk of heart disease? It'll depend in part on what genes you have that make the risks worse in addition to what benefits you most value.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Of course, the slimy lawyers in Congress saw the loophole in this populist amendment right away: just pass a law making raises automatic, and once it's in effect they get raises forever.
You do realize that all this means is that any automatic raise had to wait until the next election after it was passed. It can be removed as easily, but that would just have to wait until the next election to take effect.
It doesn't mean that every time they get a raise, the counter resets on when it could be repealed.
"A car is just a big purse on wheels." -- Johanna Reynolds