schoper

I correctly described the situation. I think it's ugly too. Do you have a fix? Because that's what we need, a fix, not cheap moralizing.

Moralizing doesn't save anyone from gangrene and sepsis and a slow death. It doesn't prevent the diarrhea to dehydration to death sequence. It doesn't do an ounce of good for anyone.

Immunocompromise (poor, sick, elderly, AIDS, etc.) + long-term antibiotic use = Antibiotic resistance.

That equation is death, and we need fixes, not the crap in your comment above.

"Also, I don't know how your society is or does, but in our country the poor have a better immune system."

No doubt you live on Mars or Venus.

Antibiotic resistance shows up among the unhealthiest communities first. They act as the necessary incubators that resistance needs to develop. In a person with a working immune system, the time frame of antibiotic and pathogen contact is very small compared to the time frame of antibiotic and pathogen contact in an immunocompromised patient.

To put the above into simple English: Our problem isn't that we give antibiotics out like candy, it's that we give them to the elderly, people with AIDS, the poor, etc. This massively increases the chance of antibiotic resistance developing.

What can we do about it? To start with, run the numbers, make some cost-benefit calculations, and think about the problem. There may be technical as well as social solutions.

Not thinking about the problem, making it harder for the healthiest people to get antibiotics, and pretending that you are doing something is also a viable option. It's what we're doing now.

Except for deaf children, who seem to fall along the same IQ distribution as hearing children. And rich children seem to inherit their parents IQs instead of their Guatemalan nannies' IQs.

But feel free to go on believing that genes don't do anything. God just must have created everyone equal.

No worries, the government subsidizes the living arrangements of the lower classes so that they can continue to live and breed in pathological concentrations in expensive cities. The supply of people to mug/rape you is still higher than out in the suburbs.

Cars ruin everything about urban life. Look at what happened to SF when the automobile came on the scene in the 30's:

http://www.oldsf.org

It's not a moral calculus, Dan.

No it doesn't. I've been poor. There is no 1 standard deviation IQ penalty.

"The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty..."

Again, no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations on average. This is usually IQ, but will often be something like physical disability (ie., blindness), ugliness, or poor socialization, inherent or learned. This does not mean that it is all right to construct a society without full employment or universal healthcare. But if people trying to help the poor continue to be taken in by the above belief, they are never going to get anywhere.

Please delete your above comment. It's derogatory and wrong. In fact, I believe the following:

There are a great many intelligent black people. Christians in America's underclass are just as likely to cohabit without marriage as non-Christians. If gay people, as a class, are really excited about taking up the burdens of marriage, I have no objection. They can't change their sexual preference, after all.

That is certainly a possibility. Unless that customer comes from a state with privately run DMVs, and is used to a 5 minute wait without scheduling. Further, it may be that that customer has been greatly impressed by the efficiency and wealth of California's private industry compared to his old state, and was not entirely prepared for the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of California's government.

Jessed, I can tell that you love your government. I'm going to suggest something that you can listen to or not, as you choose: Part of loving your government means examining critiques and saying "how can this be improved?" rather than wearing your heart on your sleeve about it.

Oh, but I tell all my friends and family: "Get a government job!"

I use the DMV in Redwood City, CA, and efficiency is not my experience there. They have the worker pool model as well. The last time I was there, I was unfortunate to be in the pool with the worker who could barely type. He processed 2-3 customers in an hour, while the Asian gentleman who replaced him at lunch processed 5 times as many. The first gentleman, I assume, is fit for his current position or McDonalds.

I have used stunningly efficient DMVs. They do exist. But the existence of DMVs that do not scrape the bottom of the barrel for hiring, and are more efficient because of it, is proof of my point, if you take a moment to think about it.

JamisonM, please travel to your local DMV, and while you spend most of your day waiting in the line, repeat to yourself: "My government is behemoth, and therefore large enough to both hire intelligent people for important roles, and also provide sinecures for talentless individuals from groups with political clout for non-vital roles."

Smart white guy gets locked up, manages to make something of himself once his hormones cool off over the course of a few years. This is not rare. Nor is it something you can apply to the general prison population. I.e., think of what the racial makeup of prison would look like 5 years after you started giving smarter people lesser sentences due to their lower rates of recidivism (and vice-versa).

The average prison inmate has an IQ of 85. What can you do with that? That is McDonalds or a government-job level human potential. Further, large swaths of criminals come from parts of our society that don't avail themselves of a traditional means of attaining social restraint: marriage. While everyone here on HN has been solving such important world problems as gay marriage, America's underclass has more or less stopped marrying. Bizarrely, the libertine paradise has not ensued.

If you have a work environment that only kills the marginal...then you have a work environment that kills the marginal. You need to start thinking about physical requirements and medical examinations before hiring, much like the military. Or maybe you need to think about putting a stop to a system that is really about hazing instead of getting stuff done.

The second might improve other things about the efficiency of your business as well. That will have economic consequences not just to you and your employees, and is therefore a thing of proper public scrutiny.

Whether or not you are convinced is your business. It took me years of hard living to learn from my mistakes. If you can learn the same lessons some easier way, or if you need to take a harder route, it's all one to me.

Danno likely meant "cornpone," a word that connotes 'rural Southern' when used of opinions.

The rural South is not usually associated with the idea that people want sex to have meaning, and that this is often transient when we find it, so DannoHung's ruminations on the subject must remain mysterious to us.

The world is full of women offering sex-on-demand. At very reasonable rates.

Edit: The great Michel Houellebecq's Platform, a novel of a travel company that revolutionizes the industry by promoting sex tourism, is a recommended read.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fic...

Sex is the great eradicator of meaning. And we all want our sex to mean something. Hence the difficulty of being a human being.

We do know, here is the paper that the journalist refers to:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/339

And here is a great video by the author:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdtE3aIUhbU

Short answer: "a bicycle should turn into a fall."

He starts dropping errors in "Type switch to handle special cases"

nature randomly determines the gender of each child

Some evidence emerging that this isn't true: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130710182941.ht...

People that tend to have more female babies: nurses. People that tend to have more male babies: CEOs.

Could low testosterone (or low "fitness," per article) in a CEO cause him to have more daughters? Could it also cause relative pay for women to go up in their company? Why would that be?

All the people reproducing themselves at replacement rate in your society (religious people) say that porn interferes with their social patterns.

Your rapport with the great Goog is weak. The study:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091305710...

Reply by the Corn Refiners Association:

http://www.corn.org/princeton-hfcs-study-errors.html

Thermodynamics question: They were holding energy inputs constant in the system. Stored energy was not constant. What third variable could have been responsible for the difference? Rhymes with input.

Supply and demand. If I wanted to make labor more expensive, I would do something about the people trying to import cheap labor.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-fourth-of-july-sermon-f...

Didn't Goethe describe this in his Theory of Color? Amazing physical/physiological study of sight.

Sure, that could be possible. However there are some issues:

1) Obesity isn't a disease of the rich. So the "cheapness" doesn't seem to be an obvious factor. This is in contrast to the 1600s and 1700s when obesity and gout were diseases of the rich in Europe.

2) In poor areas, especially the third world, we are starting to see a pattern obese mothers and malnourished children. This is bizarre. The usual pattern is to see malnourished mothers and malnourished children.

3) We can simulate the syndrome with insulin injections, which seems to suggest at least one hormonal pathway driving overeating (rather than simple psychology).

4) Women get fat after menopause (hence the estrogen supplementation industry, which turned out to be giving them cancer). Everybody starts to put on pounds at middle age. Kids seem to start eating a lot at puberty, but generally grow up rather than around. It seems like the whole system is much more complicated than "cheap, tasty food."

True. But what causes the overeating?

That critique is entirely accurate, unlike the article. I second the Crisis of Conscience recommendation.

I grew up a Jehovah's Witness (now attend a Presbyterian Church), and every piece of data in this article that touches them is bullshit.

The idea that gold-rimmed glasses are banned is just bizarre. You may see a different pair of Witnesses come by at different times because that was who was out that day, not because there is any tactic. There are no "immediate superiors." You are not disfellowshipped for "questioning an order," the idea that you even get "orders" is foolish. I suppose that idleness is a sin in some vague way, but it's not highlighted, and is no more so than for other Christians (ie., the Protestant work ethic). You can't lie or cheat, but you can drink. Maybe he's thinking Baptists? Also, you are not allowed to "lie for the cause." Witnesses don't refuse medical treatments in general, but do refuse blood transfusions.

Getting every single point wrong takes some special talent. So I assume everything else in the article about similar (or more cultish groups) is also wrong, though I am not an expert.

On the other hand, someone should definitely write an article about why the Apostle Paul was a great startup founder.

If we lived in a world where journalists knew the slightest bit about critical thinking: Hmm, I wonder if the cardboard box cuts Finland's infant mortality. Maybe I should look up infant mortality for Norway and Sweden? Oh, it's exactly the same as Finland's? Can't be the box then.

I'm willing to bet that U.S. infant mortality is the same or even lower -- for people of Finnish descent.

She's popular because she's so popular? Sounds like Google should hire Angelina Jolie as CEO to compete.