I think you’re just believing whatever the author says, and not considering the fact that reasonable people can disagree and be wrong and make mistakes. For all we know the procedure was entirely unnecessary and they agreed because he pushed for it. Also, what’s the alternative? The only system where you can go get procedures that authorities think unnecessary is a free market where you self-pay. A government-run system could equally decide that the procedure isn’t recommended.
No, government is the greatest threat to liberty. If the guy in charge of prosecuting feels the need to not just not prosecute, but actively protect someone from the state, then we really really don’t want (who? his unelected subordinates?) prosecuting people. It’s supposed to be an “err on the side of” failing to prosecute criminals. The whole point is yes… sometimes we want criminals to get away with crime, because it’s better than the alternatives.
What is the alternative? One of them is the public vote for a leader, the state destroys that leader (or his allies, etc) and then what? Do we think the public just says “Oh, well, I guess we didn’t pick the right guy?”
I’d say 170k / 5 = 34 * 25 = $850. Throw in air filters, and a couple transmission fluid changes, and it would certainly be under $2k.
That’s assuming DIY, but even if you’re paying $80 per change. If you do them every 7,500… you’re still $1,800 total.
$12k is plenty for a whole new engine, possibly a new engine and transmission on an economy car. For example, Ford will happily sell you a brand new 2.3 Ecoboost for a Mustang or Ranger or Explorer for $6k: https://www.trackey.ford.com/part/M-6007-23TA
This is why we have courts and judges, to hear complaints and issue remedies when the defendants are unwilling to do so. A better solution would be to reign in arbitration agreements, which are horribly inefficient. Arbitration purports to be lest costly, but it encourages unnecessary litigation by preventing the operation of res judicata, it increases the costs of litigation by preventing class actions, etc. It increases injuries by keeping wrongdoers conduct confidential.
The article defeats itself by acknowledging that he uses the term in a different sense… which doesn’t deny the existence or effect of germs, but focuses on the fact that for example many of the worst effects from COVID-19 were in obese people. His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ. He’s saying we miss the forest for the trees when we forget to focus on the underlying health of our bodies. Of course they wanted to write a hit piece… and what he’s saying isn’t actually controversial.
> When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus.
This is in the second paragraph and is exactly what tfa represented. It also argues directly against the idea that “a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit” using measles deaths in otherwise healthy yet unvaccinated American children as an example.
This is only a “hit piece” in that it’s blatantly critical of RFK Jr. and his ideas - those ideas are complete garbage and deserving of ridicule, and the leader of HHS espousing them should make him a target of far more criticism than this.
Doctors have tried lots of ways to treat obesity—drugs, diet and exercise recommendations, various surgeries, hypnosis, peer support groups. It’s not a problem they ignore and obviously one you can be richly rewarded for treating, as we see with the GLP-1 drugs.
It’s just difficult for many people to lose weight and keep it off.
Yeah I feel like there’s this weird implication in the prior comment that obesity is something for a doctor to cure that they simply choose not to because of idk money or other incentives or whatever
> His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.
Maybe I need reevaluate my interpretation here, but this reads heavily like you’re not only blaming doctors for failing to “cure” people’s obesity, but also for waiting too long to address it, instead (incorrectly) opting to treat or prevent the virus that the patient is seeing them for. Am I reading that right? Basically “doctors refuse to treat the real problem - obesity - and instead wait until the last second and (wrongly) treat the virus”?
> His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.
That is a quite controversial claim and one I hope he did not make. Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable? If we had not developed a vaccine I do not think people would have changed their habits, more overweight people would just have died.
The medical community has taken overweight very seriously and a lot of money has been put into developing weight loss drugs but it is not like CDC can magically make people eat better.
> Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable?
I really have no idea how you could read that from those words? He's saying he wishes we had been more proactive in tackling obesity prior to the pandemic.
As you say, yes, they already do a lot, so it's still quite misguided, but still very far from how you were framing it.
In which case he's misusing the term "miasma", oversimplifying modern medicine by labelling the entire practice as "germ theory", and presenting a false balance on the issue. And it's kinda dangerous to dog-whistle like that; vaccines have saved far more lives than simple nutrition and healthy living would be able to replace. We've seen the outcome of RFK spewing misinformation about the measles vaccine in Samoa. People suffer and die.
That’s how I feel about the title. How could that sentence ever make sense? People can support whatever they want. Which renewable resources? Pulpwood? Is it illegal to recycle?
Turns out the department that deals with farming, is going to focus on farming… and not on pushing electricity production.
Well yeah, the Department of Energy should probably be the ones spearheading our solar, wind, etc.
One problem with that is that the department of agriculture already has the relationships with farmers and producers. Now farmers who want to make a few extra bucks with some wind turbines or solar (which works well in tandem with growing stuff) have to talk to a stranger.
I’ve dealt with a lot of government agencies and never had a relationship with any of them. I doubt farmers have tight relationships with their local DOA rep.
Cool me too but I don't farm. I'm also probably missing out on resources that my taxes support. Are you?
Did those agencies you dealt with provide you with grants that you depended on to stay in business? Did those grants rely on actual proof that required onsite presence to confirm? Because it's one thing to measure a farm's yield and it's another to see how that yield came to be. There's a reason why the NRCS has field offices at the county level. It's so farmers can go there and so those working in the offices can go to the farms.
It sounds like you’re judging by the political outcomes, and frankly the tactical effectiveness is pretty far disconnected from that. It’s like saying a Chef’s knife must be dull because the meal tastes bad.
This is tautological. They’re effectively defining conspiracy theories to be things which are not widely believed, and then proclaiming that the things which are not widely believed are not widely believed…
Their definition of conspiracy theory is found in Appendix A, where they just present an ad-hoc list of things they personally believe are false beliefs. Some of the things they present are very widely believed, and at least a few of them have actually been proven true (more or less).
It's always like this with such papers. 100% of them are pseudo-science.
reply