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.
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.
God forbid say your dad is sick- Will you go and tell him- 'Dad, you better die for the sake humanity and than take these antibiotics and have you pain reduced'.
If you are poor, will you tell your kid- 'Sorry son, I have to sacrifice you for the sake of humanity, no more antibiotics for you'
The parent comment to yours is correct. Poor have better immune systems, because theirs is trained to handle such situations from their birth than yours and mine which live well sanitized environments and have never been exposed to them before.
That's at least true in a country like India. I'm not sure where you live, poor people dying out of fatal infections is one thing. But its also a fact, some that requires me or you take a sick leave doesn't even bother them.
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.
That's actually not true -- congenital deaf children average almost a standard dev below average on IQ tests. However, your overall point still stands, as non-deaf children of deaf parents do just fine.
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.
I think history has romanticized car-less cities. Horses spook easily, and kill people in the process. Massive quantities of animal feces and dead animal remains would overwhelm the minimal city waste-cleanup services. The constant sound of horseshoes on non-dirt roads is worse than normal car noise. Cars solved real problems of city life.
I think a better argument is that 'everyone' has a car, but in old cities, far from 'everyone' had a horse - they were for businesses or the wealthy only.
I would love a car-less city where the only vehicles are public transport or commercial delivery vehicles, with cycling being the only allowed personal transport.
I think this vision is shared by some of the town councils in big european towns.
For example in Paris, the current mayor (who has been in office since 2001) has made it his mission to make the city as unfriendly as possible for cars to discourage people to come to Paris in their cars.
This includes massively removing parking spots, making parking expensive all over the city, removing lanes wherever there are roadworks (to add sidewalks, bike or bus lanes, trees...) and banning cars from some of the most important streets in the city (most notably the embankments).
So far it has stopped the growth in car usage in Paris. I don't think people are ready for an outright ban on cars yet, but this surely seems like an effective strategy to prepare them for it. Maybe when the Supermetro is done and suburbans can more effectively use public transportation the city will move in this direction.
However : do you consider taxis as public transport ? What about Autolibs (shared electric cars you can pick up all around the city) ?
Edit with some stats :
Parisians overwhelmingly use public transport (63%) and not their cars (13%) to go to work. More people walk than take their cars (14%). So that would be an indication of success, however a brief walk outside at 6PM will help you see that suburbans still massively come to Paris in their cars :)
I would like to say no, but I do see the need for personal transport on occasion. I would need to think this through more, but I notice that in my local city, the place is awash in taxis - I think the numbers would have to be regulated better and people encouraged to use buses/trams/trains/bikes instead. Ideally, the public transport would be (somehow.. I admit) set up so that the need for individual point to point transport would only rarely be required...
From my visits to Paris, I'd say the biggest detriment to driving there is other drivers. It's common to see parked cars completely blocked in (cars in front and behind leaving literally a centimeter of space between bumpers), and an obscenely high percentage of cars have all sorts of scuffs and bumps (presumably from having to force their way out of parking spaces when blocked in). I'm no car nut, but I wouldn't dream of taking my own car there.
I think the issue is the people, not the cars. The people of Peachtree City, GA have a large golf cart culture. And, they still have golf cart traffic jams[1], golf cart drunk drivers[2], and severe golf cart accidents [3].
They don't 'primarily' use golf carts. They still use mostly cars. I lived there for several months. Golf carts are definitely part of the culture, the city encourages them by building paths, but the vast majority still drive cars.
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.
"Poor" can also encompass all the nice middle-class folks who are heavily leveraged in assets, with credit-card debt and student loans and mortgages and the like.
> no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations [...] like physical disability.
I hope I haven't mangled your words too badly. But I'm a bit confused - are you saying that people are responsible for being blind and thus are responsible for being poor?
It's funny how anecdotes in a comment section that support an article's premise are always upvoted/supported, but any anecdote that runs counter to it is always met with a hostile reaction.
Really, provided the article is well founded, comments that support it are doing a service to the readers and those that don't are doing a disservice (if they are giving people the sense they are typical). People respond to stories.
The problem, of course, is that anecdotes will exist on both sides of just about any issue, so they should be viewed with skepticism when trying to convince in the first place...
Do you have any statistics? I've seen cases where an article's premise has been taken apart with anecdotes and people upvote/support those also. Not often but I've seen it happen.
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.
I'm amazed you haven't deleted this post considering it must have been down-voted into oblivion. Or so I hope.
> government-job level human potential
I'm so fucking sick of hearing (presumably conservative) people badmouth and dismiss all government employees. Are you contemptuous of the law enforcement officers who protect? The firefighters who would risk their lives to save your ass should your home catch fire? The over-worked, underpaid, disrespected teachers like my wife who slave away educating your [God I hope you don't have any] children? The National Guard and FEMA workers who would pick you up off your roof in the event of a flood? The DOT employees who construct the highways you drive on? The FDA workers who make sure that everything you put in your mouth is safe and poison-free?
But no, those whole groups of people are to be held in contempt. They're all incompetent DMV workers unfit for jobs in the private sector.
I'm sorry that I'm kind of losing my shit on here right now. Maybe you don't deserve that, IDK. I've kind of been rehearsing this diatribe since a few weeks ago when my uncles went off on this tangent at a family gathering, even declaring "the only thing a government employee cares about is their paycheck." I said nothing at the time and regretted it later as the arrogance, scorn and fucking vacuity of that comment wormed its way further and further under my skin.
The patently obvious thing to say at that moment would have been something along the lines of "Oh, and are private sector employees not motivated by pay?" What a moronic assertion, that public employees, who are frequently overpaid and certainly not overpaid compared to their private sector counterparts, are somehow more motivated by financial gain than private sector employees. I suppose the firefight working for < $30k/year is just greedy. Same for my wife, who with her Master's in Education pulls in less than a Junior developer at Innitech. Obviously the only reason they do the work they do is for the pay. Whereas the VP of Sales at GE does what he does out of altruism and selflessness.
Ridiculous.
Are there incompetent, unmotivated government employees? Certainly. Are they more prevalent than disengaged employees in huge private corporations? I'm not so sure. All I know is, with all the shitting on that gets done en masse on government employees, someone needs to defend them.
The person to which you replied mentioned McDonalds and government jobs together, just after mentioning that typical prisoners have low intelligence and so are not qualified for many kinds of work.
It can easily be deduced that they were talking about cashiers and line cooks at McDonalds, and about entry-level jobs in mundane government offices or in low-skill, manual labor. You had no need to defend the writers, artists, managers and scientists McDonalds employs because this was obvious -- and you didn't. Similarly, you don't need to defend the skilled professionals government agencies employ. The person to which you responded, you, me, and every other reader knows that both large public companies and governments hire employees at all levels.
I understand that you are trying to make up for not saying something to your uncle. You are upset that your uncle made a remark arrogantly, scornfully and with vitriol. I believe you. However, I do not see any of that in the post to which you responded and so don't think you have redeemed yourself here. You should talk to your uncle instead.
Maybe that's a wise policy though? I don't think mandatory IQ tests are common in private industry, but there are plenty of jobs were being "too smart" is a huge knock. And it makes sense really, smarter people are more prone to boredom and stirring up trouble if unhappy.
Try asking you uncles why they say X before you share that diatribe. It'll help to temper your arguments with their perspective of how some particular inspector wouldn't even talk to them about an exception to a rule which maybe isn't applicable to this one of five locations. Seriously it wasn't till FEMA that you mentioned organizations people bad mouthing government employees might, Might, refer to. So as worded your talk will fall on deaf ears.
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."
I don't know why people still harp on the DMV. Of the two in my area, I've never been in one longer than 20 minutes. They've adopted a worker pool model. You walk in and a greeter assigns you to an appropriate queue based on the type of service you need, and then 3-4 workers consume each queue type. It's stunningly efficient to say the least.
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.
What do you have to say about the customer who has the option to schedule an appointment online, disregards that option, and then complains about being subjected to a wait? Severely entitled and unduly convinced of self-superiority come to mind.
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.
Reasonable critique. Not -- the Asian guy was faster so I'm right and government jobs are for iq 85 people.
Which speaks to motivation as much as ability anyway. Thorsten Veblen observed that only the lower and upper classes get what work is for -- the middle classes are the only ones stupid enough to apply all their effort grinding through an imaginary career hierarchy. From that perspective the other guy, no doubt you mean to imply he's black given your other statements, is actually executing the superior strategy.
And actually, here's another thought: it's a good thing for society that we have a place for iq 85 people to contribute and earn a living. I don't hold it against people for having an 85 iq, just like I don't credit people with 150 iqs with an achievement. Those things are largely determined before you're aware of them anyway.
Also: which states have private DMVs with 5-minute waits?
It is not a reasonable critique. He specifically mentioned the faster employee was 'Asian' as a racist dog-whistle. His problem isn't with 'government workers', it's with 'lazy black people'. Don't feed the racist troll.
Half of the time when I'm pissed off at the DMV, it's because I stupidly forgot to bring a document that I needed. I'm afraid to admit DMV workers have far more to complain about me than I them.
And you believe the private sector is any different? If you do, then you haven't worked in any big and rusty corporation where the only reason Joe in Accounting has been there for the past 30 years is because he knows which buttons to click on the legacy system to make the printer spit out the invoices.
You seem to have an extremely limited view of government jobs.
The government does need rubbish collectors, DMV personnel, and cleaners, all the way up to engineers, accountants and lawyers. Not to mention policemen, teachers, the defense force.
BTW the DMV is smart enough to realise voters don't care and can save money by having extremely long DMV lines. People working at a DMV can't change anything, and probably care even less.
There are plenty of smart people in government, but working for the government is soul destroying. There are great exceptions, like NASA and other research positions, but largely I think this quote from the Caine Mutiny sums up all government service:
"The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one."
I suspect you may have cause and effect reversed. Government employment is not soul-destroying; rather, government self-selects applicants from the pool of people who enjoy legal theft and extortion and telling others how to live their lives. It's difficult to destroy a soul that doesn't exist.
I think your analysis is pretty cynical, but not cynical enough. Government employees, as a class, are not interested in doing anything but avoiding work. They certainly don't have any political philosophy driving their actions.
I wish someone had told me that back when I worked in the public sector, all my colleagues too! We thought we were all trying to execute public services well. Is the work avoidance conscious or unconscious? If it was unconscious have I lost it now that I work for myself or am I secretly undermining my own business? Please, tell me all about myself.
You're right of course. Government is a model of efficiency. Government workers are often found working late into the night, and if you look at the parking lot at most government agencies at 6PM you'll find them full. You will never see a rush out the door at exactly 4:00. It would be shockingly bad customer service to close the door at 4 when people are waiting, and that's why government offices never do that, expecting you to show up the next morning.
You'll never find that a government worker refuses to show up to do some essential work, even though overtime is not approved. I mean, they are on salary, so it would be crazy of them to demand overtime pay when in any non-government job they would be considered exempt salaried employees and would not qualify for overtime.
Besides these great qualities, government employees are known for how much they try to make the system work for people despite silly bureaucratic rules.
Finally, they treat each other well and respect the institutions they work for. You certainly wouldn't find that government workers routinely sue their employers when they are passed over for promotions with cause. And it would be crazy to imagine a world where hiring and firing were purely seniority based, all government workers want the government to have the best team possible, and they wouldn't support a union contract that put their own job security in front of all semblance of meritocracy.
I had to read this a few times to realize that you actually just said "we should give white people lower prison sentences for the same crimes because they're smarter and less likely to reoffend, unlike black people who are stupid and commit crimes because they're too stupid to get good jobs, and because they're really horny and don't get married like good Christians should. Also, gay marriage sucks."
So, um...that was a hell of a stealthy dog-whistle there. Congratulations, I guess.
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.
So your parent comment is derogatory and wrong, but your comments about unwed parents, government employees, and “the racial makeup of prison… after you started giving smarter people lesser sentences” aren’t? Did I miss something?
where'd you find that one? Assuming you've got a solid cross-section of tests to average, what kind of motivation do you think those prisoners get to score highly on THAT test? Maybe they were their school tests... What kind of motivation do you think those students had to score highly on those tests?
>What can you do with that? That is McDonalds or a government-job level human potential.
Ever seen that Undercover Boss show? The CEO of Waste Management was fired for being inept as a menial trash collector and laborer. I've seen electrical engineering students (good ones!) get fired as custodians, for much of the same.
I met an ex-CPA with a rocketing hobby working at a DMV in Arizona over a cigarette outside. He was QUITE good at his job, and intelligent and thoughtful to boot. There are many many others like him.
You really shouldn't group people into big lumpy categories, and you really shouldn't look down on people or positions. It's rude for one, but it will also severely detriment your understanding of people. I could give a damn either way, but you'll be worse off for it.
>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.
Wait... What? did you just draw a correlation between an abandonment of the institution of marriage, and criminality?
Let me put this in terms you may understand:
"In God we trust; all others must bring data"
> The average prison inmate has an IQ of 85. What can you do with that?
A lot of research is now pointing to lead being the cause of a decent amount of crime. Children who grow up exposed to lead have much lower impulse control which ends up being at the root of a lot of crime.
See here[1] for a story on how the murder rate in Jamaica has dropped as a generation grows up without lead paint.
I'm a Gov employee and I'm not certain how to take this comment. Is my IQ no higher than 85? There certainly are plenty of Gov employees with an IQ of 85 but there are also many jobs in Gov that only require that.
That gif is quite childish – but also entirely correct. schoper is awesome at spouting cleverly disguised standard racist talking points. Nothing interesting to see there.
>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 above statement implies that if you let smart people out prison, the racial makeup of prisons would change. This indicates a position of assigning a pretty high correlation to intelligence and race; ie, a prejudice based on ethnicity. Seems pretty clearly racist to me.
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.
For every Wall Street banker working 100+ hours a week, there is a startup founder on Hacker News that also works for 100+ hours a week.
Who's providing more value is up for debate (I'm inclined to side with the founder of a tech startup :) ), but it's bullshit to chide only one industry for putting too much pressure on employees.
I was a Google intern, and I had plenty of colleagues (including myself) that put in 100+ hour weeks. And that was no one's choice but our own.
If the argument is that quasi-mandatory long hours in tech should also be scrutinized, fully agree. Working hours in the game industry, one of the areas where it's most prevalent, have been getting some scrutiny for the past 4-5 years, and I believe the tide is slowly turning there.
There's a big difference in expectation though. Sure, you CAN put in 100 hour weeks at lots of companies, but at IBanks you're admired for it [and mocked/disrespected/sabotaged if you don't]. I have a lot of friends in banking internships, and whenever I manage to pull one to dinner at 9pm on a friday night they tell me "I had to take so much shit to make it to this!"
Just look at all the press (and the initial forum threads) around this death; notice how everyone's describing him as "one of BAML's best interns"? Why do you think they called him that? Because of the quality of his work, or because of the hours he pulled? I'll give you a hint: IBanking work, at least at the intern level, is really easy.
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.
This was downvoted and yet seems to me a perceptive comment. Unless Pure drastically limits the quantity / quality of men, they aren't going to succeed because overwhelming male response will drive out women.
The developers behind Pure presumably aren't stupid, of course, and know much more about how to solve this problem than I do. The problem most women have is not sex, but finding someone they actually want to have sex with and (who also wants to have sex with them). That's where filtering becomes important.
I think the "most women" mindset is where things start to go wrong with analyses of sex. I think that there are enough people out there (men and women both) that "large enough" subsets exist to make things like this work.
My personal hypotheses are: 1) the subset of women who want to have casual encounters regularly is small; 2) the subset who want to have casual encounters sometimes is very large; 3) if you can reduce friction and stigma significantly then you can activate a modest size subset of women who want a casual encounter now.
--
When I lived in NYC, I found happy casual consensual sex through Nerve / CL / OkCupid on the same day I looked about 50% of the time I was interested (between 5-10 successes and some awkwardness but no failures).
You should publish a how-to guide for women. Really. Some best practices to avoid potential stalkers and maintain anonymity. These two issues are my main reasons for not participating in the online dating environment.
I'm afraid of traveling to somebody's place due to potential hidden cams; thank you very much Mr. Tucker Max. I'm afraid of hosting, because if the guy is a creep, now he's a creep with my address, and with a little digging around, my name, which probably leads to my work. Hotels that I would decide to go to ad-hoc are the best option, but as of now I can't spare hundreds of dollars per encounter. Besides do hotels allow registering with a pseudonym?
So as a woman who might be open to the idea, but has the above concerns, there really is no option for me other than a relationship (as in, vetting the guy myself before any fun) and social contacts (people who've been vetted by my friends).
Oddly LTR dating sites do quite fine despite the fact that the better they are the sooner their users leave.
Men looking for sex drive away women looking for LTRs, that's about it. Women looking for sex having a huge selection just means having their needs met sooner.
You're right in that if you're running a dating site for LTRs NSA men drive away women, but NSA men don't drive away NSA women.
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.
Your statements are philosophical pablum. They have nothing convincing about them. I thought it might be a quote from something, but if it is, I can't find it.
I'm sorry that I used a colloquialism and muddied my meaning. I thought it was a funny turn of phrase.
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.
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.