I suspect you and I do agree to a large extent on personal responsibility. Where I think we diverge is in the proper role of government in society. I believe that there are a large number of things that a free market does incredibly poorly, and I see a legitimate role for government in providing those things. I see other things where a regulated free market is a much better approach. I see unfettered free markets as destructive as your .gov.

Yes I think home schooling is fine provided the kids meet basic proficiency tests. Keeping your kids home and not educating them is unacceptable. And while I don't believe in beating children, I do recognize there are occasions when it is warranted. And if your kid is old enough to take care of themselves, then yeah, leaving them unattended in a car is fine.

Damn good questions. Personally, I think teachers unions are one of the worst developments to ever hit schools. They truly do promote incompetence and laziness.

Actually, I did look at your links. No, I don't consider Fox News a legitimate news agency. They absolutely have an anti-government agenda. Second, their expert, Holtoff, runs his a practice peddling his own medicines. Can you say "snake oil"? I guess a legitimate question is why do you believe him when you proclaim to not believe what people say?

For the record, it was never my intent to insult you personally. If I have I do apologize. However, the arguments you put forth have absolutely zero basis in scientific fact and as a practicing scientist, I believe I have an obligation to point this out. And how do you argue with something that is complete and utter nonsense?

I didn't really wanted to join this debate, but this attitude is just crazy. No one can be hold personally responsible. No one intentionally infect others (Except from some wackos stabbing people with AIDS infected shots). Wasn't the first infected person a kid from Mexico? Is he now responsible for several hundred dead people?

Your freedom stops where my starts. NO ONE is to tell me what shots to take. Ever. If people is so extremely afraid of this flu THEY have to stay indoors until they got the vaccine. You can't blame the whole world because you get sick. Everyone needs to take responsibility for them self.

In a perfect world, people WOULD stay indoors to minimize the risk of infecting others. But this is far from a perfect world, and the society can't stop because of a flu that (In Norway atleast) kill far less people then the regular flu. What would happen if half the working stock of the whole world suddenly had to stay indoors because of a flu?

Then surely the chances of infecting the other half shrinks? If you have a contagious illness - whether you have a vaccine or not - the responsible thing to do is to quarantine yourself to prevent you passing it onto someone else. If you knowingly have a contagious illness and you expose others to it then you are responsible for whatever happens to those people.

Don't know about you, but If I contract the virus, I WILL stay at home until I can no longer infect anyone else.
The thought of perhaps passing the virus to an infant or an elderly person who might die when I could have prevented doing so would be too big a burden on my conscience.
Not in your case obviously.

And in the case of the Mexican kid: he couldn't know he was infected with a new strain of influenza, so he can't exactly be held responsible. But if you know you are infected and continue to expose yourself to other people, then yes, you are responsible.

And I didn't tell you to take any shots. You can be like all the other crazy wingnuts and reject all forms of immunization known to man for all I care, it is your choice.

Really, you want people who are not infected to stay at home until a vaccine becomes available. How about staying at home IF they are infected or if they have been in contact with someone who has been infected?

True, but again, if someone is showing symptoms of infection it is only the responsible thing to do, for their sake and those they have contact with, to visit a doctor.

And again, where did I suggest that half a country's work force should stay at home? I said, and I quote:

Emphasis added in case you missed that conditional branch.

I would like to reiterate my claim that you are atleast slightly insane.

I have 3 character value arguments to make which better elaborate everything I've said. Whether or not you can stop putting words into my mouth after having read them, I do not know. However, I am not a puss puss mcgee, and love to see if my theories are accurate, or off by a mile or more.


A.) You stated yourself, it takes a lot of people to do something. Factor this into my statement that [something is] "imposed on them by people supporting your position"


Ala - Government must regulate everything, or else there will be lots of people willfully and gleefully destroying themselves, and their environment.

*sarcasm mode on* clearly observable in pre-1900 lifestyles, when .gov wasn't as well developed as it is today (Though it did retain the power to be bribed endlessly)

Couple that with a super-awesome-beyond-your-wildest-dreams Thought Generating Machine (TGM) or (TV) for short, and you get people supporting companies that support their disfigured/dead babies.

B.) I grow my own vegetables all the time. I'm eating homegrown tomatoes right now. It's awesome living in Houston, because whatever I want, for the most part, I can have.

I vote with my wallet every day, by buying as little as possible to stay alive. Gasoline is routinely my #1 expenditure. Short of that, and due to the amazing size and spread of all fubared food sources, I choose to blindfold myself when selecting food products. None of it is in my best interest, and none of it is particularly healthy compared to the squirrel I shot in the tree outside of my backdoor this morning (relax, even though it was an aerial shot, there is a swamp behind my house, complete with tall trees, and DENNNSSSEEE brush. I heard the pellet stop, as a matter of fact.)

The regulations you propose don't exist. If they did, the only thing that would happen is the typical thing that happens with anti-piracy software. IT GETS CRACKED, AND USUALLY THE SAME DAY IT'S RELEASED!


C.) You seem to believe that, unhinged from governmental regulations, that everyone would want to die. I'm 100% certain that is not the case.
Those who seek to survive by parasitic means, would meet the usual fate here in TX.. They'd get shot.


Summary - GOOD education will teach you these principles. These principles DON'T NEED regulations. Besides.. I've taught myself plenty of things with little effort, and you could too, if you'd ever quit being such a puss puss mcgee, and thinking that just because you don't spend your entire life learning a system that changes to keep you learning about it (IE, spending money on it, or not learning about it) that you can't learn anything. That, dude, is how societies die.



@easuter's next comment - Dude, during the incubation period of the virus, you are contagious. It's possible to not have symptoms, and still be contagious. Perhaps not with the swine flu, but with other diseases this is most definitely the case. Your argument is hitting on an irrational path, *in a robotic voice* DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!


@Hangdog42 - You asked for one regulation a parent has on his upbringing of his child. I gave you several.
You kind of answered my questions, but not with the legalese answer I was hoping, after your explanations of vaccines. We agree for the most part, anyway, though "homeschooling" isn't necessarily the best option. MY stance on this is - Give the kid some stuff to experiment with, and let him learn from that. That's what my parents did (and once away from them, I continue to do so for lack of a better option), and now I can do all kinds of neat things few people I know today can do. If they can do em, it's rare that they can do half of the other things I can do.

Granted, mathematics, reading, writing, etc are necessities, but each of these concepts reside within the human mind at birth. The ACT of writing out, and explaining mathematics to someone, is what is difficult to discover on your own, in the amount of time it can be achieved when instruction from a lover of such topics is available. This is why schools were important, however, I've encountered many math teachers of all grade levels that don't know much about it. I've also met English teachers that don't know much about English. These issues are what's breaking the education system at the end-user level, but what puts these teachers in there to begin with, and once outed, what keeps them there anyway?

In a perfect world it is. But this isn't an imaginary world. It doesn't work like that in real life. The symptoms for this flu is exactly the same as a regular flu. So basically EVERYONE that feels just a LITTLE ill need to stay indoors for > 1 week after their symptoms go away. And that is just not going to happen.

So it's useless to talk whats responsible as long as that option is unrealistic. I can even be sick and spreading this decease without knowing it. And wouldn't the person infecting me also be partly responsible?

Anyway, you can't hold someone responsible for an accident. Of course, it would be the right thing to do to stay home. But people need food. To get this food you need money. To get money you need to work. At some point everyone needs to get out.

At my old job, things broke down if one person was away for one day. I can't imagine how that would work if ~50% were away for two weeks. My boss would literally "command" people back to work. Not that he got any formal jurisdiction, but people tend to be willing to go back to work when they feel fine, even tho you can infect people > 1 week after the symptoms go away.

Just think about it. How would you feel if you called your employee and asked them how they felt. They said they were fine. Wouldn't you be somewhat pissed off if they said the were fine and looked forward to start working again in a week? People can lose their jobs for less these days.

Oh, so laws and regulations can be cracked like software? ORLY?!
Tell me, how is fining a company like Monsanto to force it into compliance going to be "cracked". Fining them would hit them where it hurts: their wallets, and would definitely make them do something about it.

Case in point: Microsoft VS the EU. Thanks to the European Comission slapping a massive fine on Microsoft, we now have access to protocols and documentation that should have been available in the first place in the interest of free market competition. Unfortunately the free market left to its own devices doesn't always work so well. Microsoft refused to comply initially, and the fine grew to about $900 million, IIRC. And it would continue to grow until they complied. Guess what they did? They opened up their protocols to the free market that you love so much. Now competition is growing and we are all the better for it, thanks to the intervention of an uber evil .gov.

Not that everyone would want to die, but that it would create an "Me VS everyone else" mentality where there is no coperation unless there is something in it for you.

Disturbing.

Yeah, and if you don't have an education system because there is no standard to be enforced...we are back to square one.

Societies die due to many factors, but one of them is a lack of long term planning for the society as a whole, where only the short term consequences for actions are considered. Your "do whatever the hell you want" policy is one of these cases. If the society does not have a common purpose of self-preservation, it won't last very long.

The monsanto angle - What makes a monopoly a monopoly, my friend?

This already IS a me vs everyone society. Don't you go outside, EVER?
Why do people get paid? Oh, I know, because THEY DON'T DO SH*T FOR NOTHING!

What's more disturbing than justice, is injustice. No one got the guns out for Bernie Madoff, and look what happened.

There are crappy standards in education ATM.. Teachers having sex with students, adultry, piss poor knowledge gains from the schools, etc.. What's worse, no school, or a school that makes you dumber than when you went in? (and by dumber I mean distracted from the important topics, which have been a staple subject within all schools, as far back as I can recall. Reading, writing, history, science, and math. Instead of these topics being the focus of kids today, their focus is instead on anything but that. This, in part, MUST be the teacher's fault. Ask any kid today, "Do you have any favorite teachers?" and the response should be "Yeah, I like this one teacher pretty well." and then you ask, "Why?" and you might get a response ranging from, "She's fun, and we do stuff." or "She lets me play around." If the response is because she's actually doing her job, and the kid likes it, you probably have a good teacher.. if not, or the latter option is true, then you have someone who should be fired, but good luck doing that!)

Societies die because people get lazy, and let it happen. Or, in the new scenario, society will die because so many people, like you, support its destruction. Why? I don't have the slightest clue. Perhaps this thread can take a new turn..

What is it, easuter, that drives you to say the things you do?
Where are you coming from, and where are you going with all of this?

And during the time that you are unaware of it, obviously you don't know and cant do anything about it. As I stated in the previous comment: IF YOU ARE SHOWING SYMPTOMS, then visit a doctor. IF YOU KNOW YOU ARE INFECTED, then stay at home.
Of course it is IMPOSSIBLE to demand that someone stay at home if they don't even show signs of infection, and that isn't what I suggested!
What part of that post did you not understand? Do you need me act like Glenn Beck and use a white-board with lots of pretty diagrams to explain myself better?

And that is the right thing to do, but that isn't what the rest of the world is doing. And you definently can't count on everyone else to do so.

(And I wasn't talking about me, but generally. Personally I canceled a vacation to my parents and grand parents precisely because of a flu. I'm just arguing that blaming someone for someone elses death is wrong in this case).

But currently the regular flu kill more people, so should he be staying indoors anyway?

(I'm not blaming him, it's just a retorical question).


Yes, but this is (supposedly) a pandemic flu. Here, they believe it will reach it's maximum in about two months with approximately one million infected (Out of < 5million residents). So 1/5 will in the next two months get the flu. I don't know about southern Europe, but up north we don't take turn in getting sick. Everyone gets it in about the same time. So in your logic, 1/5 should stay home. But that includes people that isn't working. So perhaps 1/3 of the work stock get infected.

But that's not all, because that's just the ones that got swineflu. Since now 1 million people are waiting for a doctors appointment, you won't even bother calling and ask for an appointment, because you won't get one. So everyone that got the regular flu needs to behave AS IF they got swineflu, so they need to stay home as well. So there is another reduction of workforce. And people with sick kids need to stay home with them, so there's even more people having to stay home.

This just isn't realistic. In an ideal world, everyone would stay home, but everyone can't stay home for two weeks if they get sick. Or perhaps a month if you get sick, and your kid get sick right afterwards.

Exactly. And you basically advocate just letting the boat sail without anyone at the helm, with no planning or long term policies.

I support it's destruction? WTF?! I'm all for preserving civilization, that is why I hate to see people like yourself saying we should just let society's problems sort themselves out and see where we go from there.

Yes, you truly are a clueless individual.

Precisely the reason why preemptive immunization is important.

Do you have an English accent? That'd be so cool!

Seriously, though. It's hard to separate subtleties within your posts when you use so many techniques to implement your emotions into your text. When I capitalize letters within a word, or a sentence, it's to show importance, but from yours, I get the sense that you're actually angry and/or screaming in your head as you type. It confuses me somewhat, and makes it difficult to understand what you're trying to say, especially when I can't recall whether or not you can actually differentiate between an incubation period, and full onset without symptoms.

My bad, man.


@ your next post -


Where is society going, and how can we plan for it?

I know, let's give the government all the power to decide that for us!

(please answer the question, though.)

I usually don't use emphasis on text in this manner, but in your case where you selectively ignore or distort what I posted, I fell like I have no other choice but to use ALL CAPS and screaming bold and italic to call your attention to the parts of the post you missed.

Actually, I am more for the implementation of a resource based economy (for example, see the Venus Project). In such a society, money is not the driving force behind anything because it doesn't exist. It is a meritocracy where the most competent person gets assigned to handle whatever task is at hand, and where technology is implemented based on it's efficiency and whether there are resources available for it.

For example, fossil fuels should be history already but because they are still monetarily viable and corporations can still make huge profits off them, they are still used. In a resource based economy, if we can implement our power generating capabilities using other means just as easily, then there is nothing stopping us. No oil companies holding patents to new battery technology, or lobbying to prevent the adoption of wind and solar power.

This would also mean that automation would become a big part of how the society functions, offloading all the dull and repetitive tasks onto machines.
And if people don't have to compete with machines (as many do in factories and assembly lines) just to be able to have money to live, then human beings can be free to pursue other more mentally challenging endeavors and be free from back breaking labour. Technology will also be able to advance much faster than it does now, because there will be no "agenda" behind it's implementation.

I know this is a very utopic view of a society, but it is not impossible. Unfortunately, it can't be done overnight because of how ingrained our current system is. There has to be some form of transition, which first and foremost starts with a good scientifically and socially oriented education. The other more difficult part is to get both corporations and governments to scale back because they are institutions that will also fight tooth-and-nail to survive and perpetuate their old self-interest. For example, politicians won't really have a reason to exist, not in their current form anyway.

In such a society, the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of our civilization unites us and means that there really are no borders between us any more. If we can stop squabbling and warring with each other, then just imagine what we could accomplish.

easuter: let it go, you're wasting your time and driving up your blood pressure. They are none so blind as those who refuse to see.