Theoretically, since "housing" is part of CPI prices could fall. But, real estate is difficult to predict:
- low interest rates boost home prices, as lower monthly payments increase "how much" house a buyer can afford
- as the post states, the Fed's actions are increasing income inequality. If rich people are getting richer, and they don't want to put their money in treasuries because the yield is zero, that money has to go somewhere. So stocks, bonds, real estate. So that may increase demand for real estate among the wealthy.
Maybe I need to rewatch it, but what I got from it was that he's not arguing against the right to free speech, he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights - specifically in his words, the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
>he's arguing against allowing the right to free speech to impinge on other rights
This is what so many people miss in this debate. We already outlaw a wide variety of speech that infringes on the rights of others. You can't threaten violence against me because that infringes on my rights. You can't slander me because it infringes on my rights. You can't reproduce my copyrighted speech because it infringes on my rights. You can't use my image to advertise your product because it infringes on my rights.
The debate isn't free speech versus no free speech. We already decided against universal free speech. The debate is now where do we draw the line between one person's rights and another person's rights.
Of course the problem, though, is that certain folks have imagined a right “not to be offended” into existence out of thin air. Or imagined that certain speech is “literally violence”.
In almost any debate there are going to be people that take one side to an necessary extreme. But at least those people who claim to have a right not to be offended are engaging in discussion. The people who demand we adhere to absolute free speech are both by definition unwilling to compromise and are coming to the conversation under false pretenses that we currently have absolute free speech in the first place.
Although I do want push back against your "literally violence" point since we handle that differently on an individual versus group basis currently. For example, if we start with the idea that slander of an individual infringes on the rights of someone, why is slandering an entire protected class of people okay? Cohen could sue me if I called him miserly (to use one of the examples of hate from his speech), but it is fine to say all Jews are miserly including Cohen? That doesn't make much logical sense to me.
Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.
I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.
>Your point is specious. The people who claim a right not to be offended are engaging in “discussion” only to redefine the limits of what’s allowed to be discussed. The limits become arbitrary, and grounded in nothing except whatever the current moral panic is. The free speech “absolutist”, such as they actually exist, are of course bounded by the actual law.
Well, yeah, this is a debate about free speech so of course one side wants to redefine what is allowed to be discussed. The difference is one side says "these are the things we don't want to be acceptable anymore" the other says "any change is unacceptable". Which side do you think is more likely to compromise? And free speech absolutists definitely exist, there are plenty in the comment sections here defending Facebook and their practice of allowing nearly anything to be posted.
>I don’t know what your example about Cohen and Jews is attempting to show. Neither example is “violence”.
I was assuming your "literally violence" comment was in relation to hate speech since that is the only time I have seen that type of language used. I was pointing out that banning hate speech can basically be viewed as simply an extension of our existing laws banning speech like defamation.
Banning hate speech may well be a good idea, but it'd be much more complicated than our restrictions on defamation.
An accusation of defamation can be countered by showing the statement is true. And, even still, we significantly weaken our laws against defamation when the person being defamed is a public figure, especially a politician, because the people who wrote US law have been extremely concerned about restrictions on political speech.
Hate speech is not defined in US law, and defining and banning it would not in any way be "simple".
It'd also be pretty sad if we apply a simplistic solution to a complex problem and make everything worse.
I wasn't answering the question of if we should try, I was narrowly responding to a single claim that laws restricting hate speech would be easy to write because it would simply be a matter of applying existing laws slightly differently. That isn't the case. Irregardless of what you think of the merits, nothing analogous to a ban on hate speech is currently on the books in the US
Assuming you refer to US law your right to not be threatened with violence is extremely limited. Furthermore, when deciding if speech is protected US courts generally do not balance one person's rights against another's. They look at whether the speech falls into a set of well defined categories (which the Supreme Court has refused to expand on many occasions recently).
Unfortunately a lot of the debate around free speech online relies on flawed assumptions about current US law. I'm not sure what restrictions should be in place, but I think incorrectly understanding the current legal standards won't help us figure out the answer.
For example, the trite phrase "Shout fire in a crowded theater" was coined in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Oliver Wendall Holms during WW1 to argue that a communist activist who wrote pamflets urging people to hide if they were drafted violated the law and should be imprisoned. Thankfully the Supreme Court subsequently realized that criticing the government in wartime and urging people not to cooperate with the military should not be illegal. The phrase is completely outdated nowadays.
Two of the excluded categories I find most frequently misapplied in this sort of debate are "true threats" and "fighting words". In general, they don't apply to most things you might expect them to.
> A statement is only a "true threat" if a reasonable person would interpret the words, in their context, as an expression of actual intent to do harm. In addition, the speaker must either intend that the words be taken as a statement of intent to do harm, or at least must be reckless about whether or not they would be interpreted that way (that's still a bit up in the air, legally).
Similarly, the doctrine of fighting words almost never applies in real life
> In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. If the "fighting words" doctrine survives — that's in serious doubt — it's limited to face-to-face insults likely to provoke a reasonable person to violent retaliation. The Supreme Court has rejected every opportunity to use the doctrine to support restrictions on speech. The "which by their very utterance inflict injury" language the Supreme Court dropped in passing finds no support whatsoever in modern law — the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence.
(I'm citing Ken White because I find his writing amusing and easy to read. If you don't like his presentation googling keywords will trivially lead you to more academically oriented sources that say essentially the same thing)
Was this something you actually did and had success with? If so, did you have chronic BV or just acute BV?
Things we’ve tried:
- boric acid suppositories (this helps but the BV always comes back)
- hydrogen peroxide douche (no results)
- a couple essential oil mixtures (no results)
- antibiotics (BV comes back)
Through research it seems the problem may be biofilms. You kill all the bacteria except those hiding in the biofilms and so they just repopulate.
A cursory google shows iodine may bust biofilms, so this May be worth a try.
I’d gotten my partner’s microbes... After some searching I decided it was the male equivalent of BV. I’ve used various kinds of iodine on myself successfully, but I don’t have a vagina to experiment on. I’d like to experiment on my current partner, but she’s not interested in the experiment, and her condition is very minor in comparison to the partner who motivated my searches.
Another factor to look at is the person’s body temperature. People who are a few degrees below normal supposedly have different intestinal bacteria than people who have a normal body temperature.
There are unique carbohydrates in medicinal mushrooms (uhm... “polysaccharides, glycoproteins and proteoglycans“) and cranberries (D-Mannose) that might be useful to you too...
There are some probiotic blends that focus on lactobacillus that some have found helpful. These can be used externally or internally. See papers like https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X1... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24299970 for instance. If interested in this, check out the particular types of lactobacillus mentioned in these articles and make sure the product you're purchasing has those, rather than a general lacto blend. It appears that antibiotics should be a short course and probiotics a long course: killing is fast, growing is slower.
The science isn't conclusive but there are ~ zero negative side effects, so it's a good expected value.
Yeah I’d neglected to mention that we’d tried some of that as well... but the only available probiotics matching the “correct” lactobacilli strains were in Europe... so we tried a few weeks of them but between their cost and not being certain they’d even survive the long journey to California we didn’t get many doses and as mentioned weren’t confident they’d be active on arrival.
I'm a bit late to this thread but have you looked into RepHresh Gel?[1] It's a vaginal suppository that supposedly encourages lactobacillus growth. It's approved in the EU for the treatment of BV[2] but sold in the US for "odor elimination." It's definitely a bit pricey - $16 for about a week's worth on Amazon and from what I understand the EU guidelines suggest using it somewhat long-term to treat BV (something like 12 IIRC) so it's far from a quick fix.
I grow medicinal herbs. I have found that with Ayurveda there are herbal washes that help with restoring vaginal pH towards slight acidity.
I don’t grow them as I am not in the right zone, but I have read that there are many herbs that does this function. Plus..Ayurveda takes a whole systems approach and includes dietary changes and lifestyle tips. Most of it was targeted towards menopausal and perimenopausal women who go through the changes and will affect whole body pH. The kind of herbs depends on the individual’s constitution.
I am pretty sure TCM has similar protocols for women’s health but the names were not familiar to me and I didn’t feel confident enough to enquire in a language that I wasn’t fluent in..
Do you know where in the timeline of human history did ‘science’ appear?
Is boric acid protocol for BV transplanted vaginal microbiome be considered ‘science’?
(Nice. The downvoting begins. And I haven’t even started. What’s the point? You guys please continue to enjoy talking amongst yourselves about scientific ways to deal with vaginal pH.)
Please note that I'm not saying that Ayurveda or TMC doesn't contain things that work. I'm just saying that a lot of those things haven't seen any proper testing done, so we don't know whether they work better than a placebo, or even whether they are safe, and of the things we did test, few worked particularly well.
Your complaints sound like they're coming from someone who went on a cruise to almost any third world island - though maybe other destinations are better controlled by the cruise companies to take you to specific (clean) tourist ports.
Cuba is not without its problems, but much of what you describe is not unique to a third world country.
The one area you're just completely wrong about is the flavors. I was only able to stay for 10 days, but on my short trip there I stayed in locals' houses (which is quite common there - google "casas particulares") and the vast majority of the meals we had - especially the ones cooked by the people we stayed with - were extremely flavorful.
I'm not claiming socialism is great or anything - there was a potato shortage while I was there - but I'd just hope no one reads your post and thinks Cubans are eating terrible bland food...
>Cuba is not without its problems, but much of what you describe is not unique to a third world country.
>I'm not claiming socialism is great or anything - there was a potato shortage while I was there
But the point is that the countries that were third world a half century ago but have since raised themselves up to developed status did so through free market economics, while the socialist dictatorship countries like Cuba failed.
Apparently, the methods used for planning economies known until ~1990, executed with the computers and communication systems of the time, in countries that were relatively poor to begin with, ruled as dictatorships, did not work well enough while the USA and its allies actively fought "communism". That tells us nothing.
Guess which country is the richest in the Caribbean? Okay, it's the USA. It may hardly be a democracy anymore, it doesn't particularly respect human rights, but it hasn't regressed to developing status yet and it has free market economics up the wazoo. The richest independent country (as in, its mainland is in the Caribbean) is of course Cuba.
Only if you believe in the Cuban government’s numbers. Do you really believe that a country whose population lives on rations and $30/month salaries is a rich one?
If the discussion isn't proceeding in a thoughtful, constructive fashion then don't proceed. Downvotes are fine—flags if a comment or submission breaks the guidelines.
Hi sctb, I’m given to understand that you’re one of the moderators here. I’ve tried to contact you twice in two weeks through email without a response, so I’m concerned that it’s hitting your spam folder. Is there a better way to contact you? I don’t feel good about inserting my comment in an unrelated post like this, but I’m unsure what else to do.
> What it always comes to is liberals being ignorant.
The ad-hominem also always follows.
> beat many market economies
You call me ignorant and follow with this? Whichmarket economy is Cuba beating specifically? I’ve asked many times and you failed to name one country.
Yet you persist with the notion that a country whose population lives on rations; who has no freedom, be it political, of speech, of the press, or even the freedom to leave their country; whose main city is a crumbling town; who has no access to quality medicine (yes, despite the memes you hear from its apologists)... I could go on... you think this country is beating anyone?
Do you think an economy who survives on aid from other totalitarian states such as Venezuela or in corruption money from political friends from other countries like Brazil is beating anyone?
> You probably think that Somalia doesn't have a free market, because if something doesn't work, it's not a free market.
Your mind-reading abilities are terrible. You never stopped moving the goalposts in this conversation, and now you’re trying to frame me as an anarchist?
“Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.”
It depended on the restaurant. I got the feeling that some restaurants somehow had access to special flavorful ingredients, and some did not. I would not be surprised if this was simply the corrupt side of life in a communist-run institution.
We have a favorite Cuban place in the States (shout-out to Corazón de Cuba in Long Beach, Long Island) and the owner said that he is able to make much more flavorful food in the states than he was in Cuba proper
Assuming it's like the last version on iOS (which I was lucky enough to download before it got yanked) you can just plug in your device and throw whatever videos you want into VLC's documents folder. Transfers really quickly over USB.
Well the iPhone didn't come to Verizon for years because Apple would not let Verizon put its bloatware on the phone. Verizon only caved because Apple sales were so strong. iPhone only comes with Apple software, you have to manually download any Verizon apps.
My parents both got Androids recently, and while you can "hide" the pre-installed bloatware you still can't delete it. It took me about 30 minutes to clean the phones of all the widgets and crapware.
As the newcomer, a Ubuntu phone really wouldn't have any bargaining power and would be as bad or worse than Android.
Part of the problem of an "open" system is that the very flexibility/openness means your position is weak - there's very little you "can't" do.
Especially if you do it for one carrier - you can't easily say no to the next one.
Whereas with Apple, the carrier has no idea if the product is capable of their needs, and besides with the Apple brand it will sell millions regardless.
In a nutshell Zoomendar is a fully touch-enabled calendar. Basically you navigate your calendar by swiping, tapping and pinching. As always I'd love feedback of any kind.
Here's my latest work worth showing. Started it back in late October, and while it definitely didn't take me THAT long (life got in the way plenty) this is definitely more than just a "weekend project" for me.
In a nutshell Zoomendar is a fully touch-enabled calendar. Basically you navigate your calendar by swiping, tapping and pinching. I think it's the natural evolution of the touchscreen calendar. As always I'd love feedback of any kind.
>It was thus difficult for Semmelweis to make a "scientific" case for why the lime worked
Aren't you supposed to regard empiricism above all else in science? While holding to that rule would force Semmelweis to alter his theory as well, the observation of the highly reduced mortality rates should have forced the medical powers that be to reconsider things also - the burden is on them to make a scientific case for why lime had nothing to do with the decreased mortality rates.
I agree there were probably other reasons they fired him, but I think that only helps Aaron's points.
It is not evident that Semmelweis himself regarded empiricism above all else. Rather, it seems like Semmelweis made an empirical observation (death rates plummeted when attendants washed their hands in lime), but then jumped to a conclusion (lime was removing cadaverine particles) and fixated on that conclusion instead of of the observation. Convert the narrative (lossily) to modern science, and imagine someone far more focused on their journal article than on saving lives.
Semmelweis went "on tilt" with his hypothesis. Even after doctors adopted a regime of disinfecting hand washes, hospitals still saw a significant rate of childbed fever. Semmelweis demanded of the scientific establishment that they recognize cadaverine tissue as the cause, going so far as to suggest that tissues in the mother were occasionally being crushed during childbirth, and later becoming gangrene, and thus mothers were infecting themselves.
Again: my point isn't that Semmelweis didn't make an important discovery, or that the scientific establishment of the time didn't miss a critically important opportunity; my point is that there is more to the story than the missed opportunity of Semmelweis' detractors.
I don't much care about the injustice of Semmelweis losing his post at a hospital in the 1840s. I am, on the other hand, fascinated by how poor framing and communication, close-mindedness, and overall bloody-mindedness prevented Semmelweis himself from becoming the godfather of the germ theory of medicine.
Isn’t this like allowing mods, custom maps etc? So CounterStrike, DoTA, etc shouldn’t exist?
Honestly I started off on the fence but now I’m 100% against Apple here, and I’m an iOS dev. This is kinda crazy.