Rural counties are conservative, urban counties are liberal, and never the twain shall meet.
I posit that there will always be this conflict until cities have a blue federation superimposed on a red countryside. But the constitution isn't set up that way. Maybe next time.
This can also be reformulated as "rural counties are empty" and point to a lot of the agita around much of the current political climate, 'cause land having as much of a vote as it does is pretty odd.
I think we need to reverse the unconstitutional Reynolds v. Sims decision which forbids the states from being set up like the federal government, with one house elected in proportion to population and one house elected geographically. The decision itself was rooted in little more than pipe dreams and moonshine, and the results are, I think, responsible for more than a little of our current dysfunction (another huge problem is the weakening of the parties themselves — they used to serve as a moderating layer, but no longer do).
The political disagreements within states are a lot less intense than the political disagreements between states. Maryland is a solidly blue state at the federal level. But we have a Republican governor with a 78% approval rating who won a third of Black voters against a Black candidate in 2018.
Finance is always gambling, ponzis, and fraud. But hey, that's not a bad thing.
Gamblers add liquidity, which is better for society than them hiding in a basement playing cards.
Stocks are essentially ponzi scheme financing. They have all the hallmarks. Then often literally use the cash from sales of stock to pay dividends. Most companies will never pay dividends, though, so the idea for a purchaser is to hold on and cash out while it's big before everyone else does.
Fraud is the worst when people have an expectation of trust, assuming they're protected by regulators. They never are. Madoff. Bre-X. Enron. Even highly regulated markets are always riddled with fraud. People should expect the market to be riddled with fraud and act accordingly - it keeps the populace wise.
Regulations are an attempt to get something for nothing which always just ends up with a bunch of friction, corruption, barriers to entry, and lawyers.
Your characterization of stocks is just wrong. The definition of a ponzi scheme is that the returns are paid by new investors but when a company is buying back shares it is earning that money by providing a service or selling a product. That product or service is purchased by a customer, not an investor. Money is coming from outside the company.
What you are misunderstanding is that the difference between paying dividends and a stock buyback isn't that great. Both mechanism distribute money owned by the company to shareholders. With dividends you simply receive a payment. With stock buybacks you get the ability to sell the stock back to the original company instead of selling the stock to another investor.
Think about it this way. The company has a valuation of 50 billion dollar. It is buying 1 billion dollar worth of stock back every year. After 50 years the company owns itself and every investor has been paid back. Of course this is an oversimplification but it shows that even if you hold onto your stock after everyone else has "cashed out" you can still earn your money back by selling the shares to the company.
I'd know what exactly you are referring to but if we assume that the black market alternative also gives you access to money then payday loans create further demand for black market alternatives because they leave people worse off than before.
But will the drug approval agencies allow genetically engineered therapies for anything disruptive? For example, they've been blocking the caries vaccine for decades.
As long as someone is willing to pay the $1-2B for the formal testing, and wait a few years for the paperwork to go through, I assume it'll work like any other procedure.
yes. here’s an extreme example, but i’d say that every monoclonal antibody therapy on the market today (11 of the top 20 biggest drugs this year) qualify.
There are no details to give, there never was a successful caries vaccine it’s just always been stuck at being worked on.
Big dental isn’t blocking it we just don’t have a good enough model and yes there isn’t a sufficient financial incentive to develop it really either.
Caries isn’t a big problem these days, it’s not then major cause of tooth problems as people grow older, dental hygiene and more importantly fluoride in water pretty much solved it for those population that were affected.
There is no financial reason to block a caries vaccine as it’s not going to have any impact on the industry, cosmetic and corrective procedures would still be just as in demand and gum disease is by far a bigger factor for tooth loss in adult patients than caries.
Not to mention that quite a lot of the “vaccines” weren’t traditional vaccines but rather replacement therapies where lacto acid producing bacteria would be replaced with strains that cannot produce it but can outcompete the lactobacillus flora in your mouth, these treatments are let’s say problematic since we have had little to no experience in flora replacement therapies and can’t predict or model the outcomes well.
Dr. Jeffrey D. Hillman invented it in the 1970s-1980s at Harvard under NIH grants (https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-DE004529-10). Swab inoculation and you're done. It worked perfectly in animals and humans.
In the 1990s, he founded Oragenics, to try to commercialize it. The FDA gave them the runaround for about 20 years before they finally mysteriously gave up. In 2016, he got a 17-year patent, so I guess it'll be shelved until 2033 at least.
There's something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Why should a simple application of genetic engineering from the 1980s take 50+ years to make it to market? It's either a complete scam or a conspiracy.
My impression (from briefly skimming papers about this a few years ago) was that there is clear evidence that myopia is strongly related to not spending enough time outside as a child, but it’s not clear to what extent the effect being outside has on eye development is from focusing the eyes far away vs. being in very bright surroundings.
I believe that someone did some studies involving outdoor schools or similar, that was considered to differentiate between those factors - being outdoors and reading was better than being indoors and reading.
Interestingly enough, in the article it does confirm that Chevron encouraged new users of the system to change certain input values to produce explosions andnl disasters right as they were first learning how to play, so that they could learn what does what in real life.
I love this! Is there a larger technologist wiki from which you can learn the principles of how to actually build everything from raw materials and generic tools?
Examples: casting iron, making blades, making paint, making plastics, making printer ink, making pharmaceuticals that actually work, etc.
It really seems that at this stage in the game we should be able to form "off-grid" villages that actually have a pretty good standard of living. Or is that all forbidden knowledge in this stage of our technological enslavation? ;)
> "off-grid" villages that actually have a pretty good standard of living
Sure, if you consider 1920s era technology to be a reasonable standard of living. Or I suppose you could cheat and import a computer or two? Not sure how you're going to fabricate high performance solar panels on your own though.
I don't know about a single Wiki but casting metal, making blades, and various pigments (so paints and inks) should be readily doable at home and the information readily accessible. Some end products have significant barriers in terms of equipment and skill though, so pick carefully.
Making plastic products might be quite involved and require specialized equipment depending on your desired starting point and polymer. (At the other extreme, 3D printing objects from purchased filament is easy but seems like it defeats the described purpose.)
A number of basic pharmaceuticals (opiates, aspirin, a few others I don't remember off the top of my head) can be readily manufactured at home if you have a garden and don't mind committing multiple felony offenses in the process. Most chemical synthesis is quite involved though and pharmaceuticals in particular tend to consist of difficult to work with organic molecules.
Pharmaceuticals and plastics are both pushing into the realm of organic chemistry which isn't very accessible without significant time spent studying. Unfortunately chemistry outside of a company or research institution has also been more or less criminalized at this point across most of the world. The vast majority of basic reagents will be classed as precursors to either illegal drugs or explosives. (Yay freedom!)
The only problem with YouTube is that it's not organized. It's not indexable or printable. Videos are on Google's servers - here today and gone tomorrow. Videos are GREAT for stuff that you can't put into text, and YouTube excels at getting info out there from people who aren't that good with computers :)
What I'm thinking is a real-life open-source "tech tree".
If we ever need this, I wouldn’t count on the ability to watch YouTube videos.
Books printed on acid-free paper or clay tablets do not copy as easily as bits, but are a lot more durable.
An alternative is to make lots of digital copies of sites like these. That’s cheaper than printing them, but a bit less durable.
I wouldn’t know which of these would be the statistically optimal (as in: information isn’t destroyed, will be found by those who need it, and can be read) method, but I don’t think YouTube is.
> there's an abundance of this type of content on Youtube
.. who makes their money monetizing the content of others.
I respect this guy for staying off the commercialized hosting site and having such a simple, functional website. That is even before my kudos to his work toward duplicating technology from the ground up, and then documenting both success and failure. The latter is something many programmers, including myself, tend to defer until the end of time.
Applied science is a channel in a similar vein. Tackles a lot of interesting engineering projects and walks through all of his results till getting his final product. Really interesting stuff.
I posit that there will always be this conflict until cities have a blue federation superimposed on a red countryside. But the constitution isn't set up that way. Maybe next time.