Edmund Storms wrote:
That's wise but unfair. If everyone did what you are doing, no one
would go first. You are letting other people act as guinea pigs,
taking the risk for you, like collective food tasters.
That's an interesting approach to ethics. Everyone has a choice to be
first in line or to wait until the path is more clear. For example,
many serious operations had a high mortality
rate initially.
Ah, but with vaccines the situation is radically different. You get
nearly all the benefit of the vaccine even when you do not take it.
Because large numbers of other people are vaccinated your chances of
getting the flu are reduced. US mortality from influenza is around
50,000 per year as I mentioned. If there were no vaccines it would be
in the hundreds of thousands. Vaccines only work as a firebreak
because a large fraction of the population is willing to take them.
Of course the people who get vaccinated also benefit directly since
they are unlikely to get the disease.
Here are a few of the bigger lies.
The government said that invading Iraq was necessary and people should
join the military to protect the country.
I did not assert that the US government is without fault. Even if we
confine the discussion to technology, I can list several dozen
technologies supported by the government that went nowhere, such as
oil shale and -- obviously -- plasma fusion.
The government said that people should spend as much as possible and
they would get richer by taking out the equity in their homes by
assuming larger mortgages. This was a lie and now many of these people
are homeless.
The government and the home loan industry both said this. The home
loan industry not only said, many banks and other organizations went
to extremes in lending, and failed to practice due diligence, for
example when they lent large sums to dead people. The government did
not do this. (These banks are nearly all bankrupt, or de facto
bankrupt as is AIG.)
The government has said that drilling for oil offshore and in the
Alaska wilderness is the best way to solve the energy problem.
On the contrary, the government has opposed this. Industry has been
saying this. I believe the government's opinion has prevailed so far:
there is no offshore drilling in the Alaska wilderness.
It remains to be seen how many of the statements about the economic
recovery are also lies.
That remains to be seen. Many experts say that compared to the
situation in Japan in the 1990s, which started out similar to our
situation, things seem promising. I wouldn't know, but that is what
K. Nishimura said the other day. He is the deputy director of the
Bank of Japan and the top economist trained at Yale University. I
suppose he would know.
- Jed
