Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, December 6, 2025, and National Rhubarb Vodka Day, celebrating what must be the world’s most dreadful hard liquor. If you really want to make the stuff—and Ceiling Cat help you if you do—here’s a short video on how to infuse vodka with rhubarb:
The federal deployments that have swept through major cities as part of President Trump’s immigration crackdown have led to thousands of arrests. But they have been less effective at apprehending immigrants with a criminal record than more routine operations elsewhere, new data shows.
In high-profile Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Los Angeles; Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and across Massachusetts, more than half of those arrested had no criminal record, compared with a third of immigrants arrested nationwide.
Here are the data given by the NYT; the green column in the right shows those arrested without any criminal charges:
The Trump administration has said that the aggressive operations are necessary because so-called sanctuary city policies have made it harder for ICE agents to go after immigrants who have committed crimes. It has deployed other federal forces, including Border Patrol and the National Guard, to expand its crackdown.
Less than 30 percent of the people arrested in any of these operations had been convicted of a crime, an analysis of the data shows, and a very small share had been convicted of a violent crime. The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.
. . .Historically, ICE worked with local law enforcement officials to take custody of immigrants held in local jails and prisons after they had served their sentences or were released. Last year, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., 63 percent of those arrested by ICE had a criminal conviction, and 24 percent had pending criminal charges.
Under President Trump, ICE arrests of all types are up, including transfers from other law enforcement agencies, the data shows. But the greatest increase in arrests has occurred outside of these programs. In five states and Washington, D.C., a majority of the people detained by ICE this year had no criminal record.
Clearly Trump is exaggerating, but that’s nothing new. The question is severalfold: do we deport anybody who entered the country illegally, regardless of what they did before? (My view is that everyone who does this should have their case adjudicate by the law rather than being snatched up and put on a plane.) Do we deport anybody who, having entered legally, has committed a crime in the U.S. ? I don’t agree with that, as some crimes don’t warrant deportation (DUI, if it happens once, doesn’t seem to be grounds for expulsion). As for major or repeated crimes, yes, but that’s not what the government is doing. And I still maintain that anybody who entered illegally should be deported only if that’s the decision of an immigration judge.
An influential vaccine advisory panel on Friday voted to lift a long-standing recommendation that all newborns receive a vaccine for hepatitis B, marking the most significant change to the childhood immunization schedule under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices approved the change despite fierce objections from medical groups who said the recommendation had proved a successful public health strategy, nearly eradicating the dangerous virus among U.S. children.
The committee voted 8-3 to eliminate a recommendation, dating to 1991, for every child to receive a first dose of a hepatitis B vaccine shortly after birth. The panel said the newborn shot is no longer necessary for babies born to mothers who test negative for the virus. They suggested parents of those children delay the first dose for at least two months and consult with their doctors about whether or when to begin administering the three-dose series.
Supporters of the change said the universal recommendation regardless of risk was overly broad and undermined informed choice. Retsef Levi, an ACIP panelist who voted to change the language, said he believes the intention is to push parents to consider whether they want to give another vaccine to their child.
“It’s actually suggesting a fundamental change in their approach to this vaccine and maybe more broadly,” said Levi, a professor of operations management at MIT.
The recommendation from the group of outside government advisers goes to the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for final approval.
Medical experts have argued that it’s important to vaccinate all newborns for hepatitis B, even if their mothers test negative, because babies are at risk of infection if their mothers receive a false negative or become infected after testing. Although the virus primarily spreads among adults through bodily fluid, young infants can also contract the virus through contact with infected people in their household. Some of the dissenting panel members pushed back on the change — psychiatrist Joseph Hibbeln called the revised guidance on hepatitis B “unconscionable,” while pediatrician Cody Meissner said the move was rooted in “baseless skepticism.”
“We will see hepatitis B infections come back,” said Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. “The vaccine is so effective, it does not make sense in my mind to change the immunization schedule.”
Believing that RFK Jr.’s real intention is to get rid of all vaccinations, or at least cut them way back, I would take the advice of the medical groups here rather than the administration’s hand-picked panel of vaccine “experts.” The real data to make this decision is a cost-benefit analysis: whether the minimal harms of early vaccination are outweighed by the harms caused by children who are vaccinated later than as newborns. And if putting off that first vaccination leads to ditching the whole series, as it well might, then those harms also have to be taken into account. Saying it’s “no longer necessary” is not data. The dictum: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies. But surely the balance of harms versus benefits applies here, and the panel as well as the newspapers are woefully short on DATA. The upside is that parents can still get the vaccine given to newborns if they want, and insurance will still pay for it. Nevertheless, this is going to confuse both doctors and patients. DATA!!!!!
*As usual, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s Friday snark-and-news column; this week’s is called “TGIF: Piddly, stupid stuff.”
→ A cold winter in Europe: Electricity is really, really expensive in Europe, as much of the continent moved to replace fossil fuels with renewables. So folks are having to ration heat this winter. Look at these prices in the UK, where salaries are much lower than here:
These people spend all their money on heat! You also have to read this post from Konstantin Kisin about having no water for a week. What the hell is going on over there, guys!? I’ll trade you guys one space heater for every X comedian you let out of jail. A humidifier will cost you a mom that posted something off-color about Muhammad.
→ Waymos will save our lives: A neurosurgeon who analyzed nearly 100 million miles of Waymo data found that the cars are involved in 91 percent fewer serious crashes than humans. These are insane numbers:
Self-driving cars are clearly the future; they are arguably a miracle. People get emotional about this. But I challenge you to go for a walk around any American city and see what drivers are doing while they drive. Texting, they’re all texting. It’s no longer texting while driving—people are driving while texting. Not to mention the people on the road wearing noise-canceling headphones and dark sunglasses, microdosing psilocybin, and yapping to a vlog camera. And also consider how crazy the average person in line at the DMV is. So you have a lunatic who is giving only 10 percent of their loon-attention to the road—and your life and your family’s lives depend on it. Yeah, I like Waymo way mo’. Self-driving now! Self-driving forever! On behalf of San Francisco: You’re welcome!
→ Every college student is disabled: Elite colleges have seen a surge in students receiving disability accommodations, and there’s a great new Atlantic story about it (I hate admitting it but it’s true—The Atlantic must be crushed for this one). From their piece: “This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability.” Yes, 38 percent of Stanford undergrads technically count as disabled. What’s going on here? They’re all just getting fake diagnoses to get extra time on tests. But here’s the crazy part: These kids believe that they are disabled. They genuinely believe that they are sick and deserve that extra time. My sister-in-law Suzy has written about the spoonies, a tribe of internet-addled young people who think they have all kinds of diseases and put themselves in wheelchairs and request feeding tubes from doctors. It’s not a niche movement. It’s going mainstream! Within a few years, at the rate Stanford’s going, the whole campus will be disabled, rolling around on ramps and stairlifts. Woe unto the kid who is actually in a wheelchair or who is actually, I don’t know, blind. Will there be a new category? Will they have to wait in line behind the 400 undergrads with wheelchair fetishes and leg braces they don’t need? Or maybe the newly disabled will decide they need to shun the actually disabled kid, who is obviously just stealing their valor. The newly disabled will have to oust the old-fashioned disabled, like the trans movement ousted the gays. I can see it now, like: Wow, the blind guy is flaunting his unsighted privilege. Comments section, please help me predict what will happen to Stanford when (very soon) more than 50 percent of the student body comes in technically “disabled.”
And don’t ask me about grade inflation, just see this article about what’s happened at Harvard.
In 2022, I wrote on Facebook that a human skeleton can only be male or female. I pointed out that if, two centuries from now, someone were to unearth the remains of today’s LGBTQI people, they would find nothing but male or female skeletons. To imagine that one would find anything other than male or female struck me as a fantasy divorced from reason, so I described it as a a mentally ill idea.
For that remark I was fined 500 Swiss francs. I refused to pay, and so, on the 2nd of December 2025, I will serve ten days in prison. It is worth noting that, legally speaking, this prison sentence is not a punishment for refusing to pay the fine. Instead, the prison sentence is an alternative way to be punished for the Facebook post itself. I have chosen to trade a monetary fine for time behind bars.
I am fully prepared to go to prison, if that is what it takes to expose the absurdity and authoritarianism of the trans ideology that has now taken root in Switzerland. I intend to face it with good humour; I will not let myself be bent or broken by those who hope to silence me through pressure or intimidation. That, after all, is their aim: to wear me down until I fall quiet. I have no intention of doing so.
The LGBTQ+ movement behaves like a zealous sect. They try to brand me a homophobe to shut me up. I am nothing of the sort. I repair wind instruments for a living, and I come from a left-wing, tolerant household. What troubles me is watching the activists in that movement exploit ordinary LGB people for political ends that strike me as dangerous nonense. These tactics have begun to cast a long shadow over Switzerland and Europe alike, as a kind of woke dictatorship.
My thanks go to Graham Linehan, who understands this battle all too well. In times like these, solidarity among reasonable people who are willing to speak freely and plainly is essential.
Indeed. To fine somebody for speaking the truth is unconscionable, and this would not go down in the U.S. as it’s free speech. But is it true? Yes, apparently. Using just adult pelvic bones, experienced anthropologists can identify skeletons as to biological sex with nearly 100% accuracy . Other bones give high but lower probability of accurate sex determination. Now there may be a small probability of error when you inspect modern or ancient remains lacking the pelvis, but what Switzerland is doing here is punishing someone for saying what’s basically true, simply because it goes against current gender ideology.
*My friend Jim “Bat” Batterson was a year ahead of me at William & Mary, and sent this note. Of course colleges have changed a lot since the late Sixties and early Seventies, but not necessarily for the better (see Nellie’s pice above).
Here is an Opinion from the Harvard Crimson’s editorial editor, class of ‘28. Seems like a lot of whining about having to go to class. I do not recall us having any holidays before Thanksgiving at W&M and, in particular, if you missed class or even left class early the last day before a vacation or missed a class or were tardy to a class the first day after a holiday, you had to visit the Dean. We thought that a bit of odd in loco parentis, but I do not recall whining about it. I think it is a different era with this editor’s mind fully coddled à la Lukianoff and Haidt.
But of course I may be totally off base…you kids get off my lawn!
Excerpts from an entitled student’s piece:
For a school that loves Google Calendar, Harvard’s fall academic calendar is a scheduling nightmare.
From an incomplete syllabus week to the lack of breaks until Thanksgiving, the calendar makes fall semester a sprint. Rather than a timeline that sustains genuine learning, students are left vulnerable to burnout.
It’s time to overhaul the whole thing.
From the very first week of the term, the calendar fails students. Because Harvard starts the semester after Labor Day, the first day of school is a Tuesday or Wednesday — making syllabus week completely uneven across courses. Students barely have a chance to settle in before they’re thrown into an irregular, staggered schedule where no one is quite sure if the semester has really begun.
The rest of the semester feels like a marathon. Harvard does not have a fall break of any kind. The closest we get is Indigenous Peoples’ Day — a single Monday off in mid-October that barely disrupts the relentless stretch of classes, papers, midterms, and problem sets. The absence of a real mid-semester pause creates an endless churn: class to midterms to more class to finals, with no real moment for students to catch their breath.
This class schedule leaves students burned out, unsupported by a structure that seems to assume endurance is a sign of excellence rather than a recipe for exhaustion.
Then, in November — right when students think they might get a break — the schedule becomes even more chaotic. After Harvard-Yale, Harvard packs two days of classes at the start of the week — something our New Haven counterparts notably don’t do. After three days of Thanksgiving break (not counting the weekend), Harvard insists on bringing everyone back for three more days of class.
This awkward partitioning creates an academic limbo. Many professors cancel class; others don’t. Some classes get skipped entirely, while others have no choice but to end early. It becomes difficult to plan, and everyone loses. Students traveling long distances may have to choose between missing valuable class time and paying dramatically inflated travel costs.
Now surely there can be better scheduling, but all in all, the present schedule seems reasonable to me. What really burns my onions, as it did Jim’s is the beefing about the “lack of breaks until Thanksgiving.” But there is a one-day break. How long a break do they need between labor day and Thanksgiving? The main problem is that students are now entitled, regarding colleges as a consumer regards a new car. Ceiling Cat forbid that you have to actually work hard once you get into Harvard. Get off my lawn!
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili continues to criticize Andrzej:
Hili: I feel like you’re overdoing it.
Andrzej: Overdoing what?
Hili: Your anger at the world.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam wrażenie, że przesadzasz.
Ja: Z czym?
Hili: Z gniewem na świat.
A tweet from Masih; be sure to read the whole thing.
This U.S.–based professor at @UArkansas is openly praising a violent theocracy. Disgraceful! She’s defending the same dictator @khamenei_ir who kills women for taking off the hijab and murders peaceful protesters.
From Luana. Are we expecting to have sex-based affirmative action in favor of men?
Brown University accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female students, but got almost twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for men to get in.
Trump’s DEI ban may end gender balancing efforts that often benefit men. https://t.co/CowmhK8FXk
Bless these girls for their courage and shame on every cowardly adult and every faux feminist who told them they should give up their own rights to pander to boys’ feelings. https://t.co/JfLeE1egpj
And two from Dr. Cobb. First, he posted a piece of history, but one that leaves out Rosalind Franklin:
This was the first newspaper coverage of the discovery of the double helix, a few weeks after publication of the three articles in Nature. It mentions all those involved, except Rosalind Franklin. She was the only one to keep a cutting (this is from her archive at Churchill College).
If you would like more information about the Emanuel Brünisholz case, I have included a link to an article here. The relevant section regarding his conviction is as follows: “In December 2022, Brünisholz wrote the following comment under a Facebook post by SVP National Council member Andreas Glarner: ‘If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you will only find men and women based on the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that has been brought up by the curriculum!’
Eight months later, Brünisholz was questioned by the police, and in September 2023, the public prosecutor’s office issued him with a penalty order. “Through his comment posted on Facebook, the accused publicly disparaged the LGBT(Q)I community on the basis of their sexual orientation in a manner that violated human dignity,” it said.”
[…]
Legally, the ruling is not without controversy. The expanded racism law invoked by the public prosecutor’s office and the court protects sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual), but not gender identity (whether one feels like a man, woman, or something else). This was a deliberate decision by parliament. Brünisholz’s Facebook comment is clearly directed against transgender people and therefore concerns gender identity. Nevertheless, the judiciary ruled that this was punishable by law.
A photo of one of the chaps that claimed vilification. The media are very circumspect in only displaying in what looks like filtered head shots of him and never photos of him looming in size over the girls. That would be far too obvious to see the truth of the matter.
While I don’t agree with the judgment, je was not put on trial for telling the truth about skeletons but for saying / implying that transgender identity is a mental illness. That is a huge distinction. It was handled the same way as if someone would publicly assert that homosexuals are mentally ill.
His attitude that gender confused people are in fact mentally ill is not unique but is quite possibly shared by many. A strong society would allow for such discussions especially if the phenomena is true as it has nothing to fear. It is when you are censored from the top down that problems can ensue. If this was a grass roots driven movement there would be no need for the judiciary to be involved in the punishment.
The problem is that gender identity is poorly, if at all, defined and remains a nebulous quality. It could be an imaginary concept since it is completely unfalsifiable.
Many of the trans women , especially the older ones, do seem to be autogynephiles and it would not be unseemly to say that they have a mental illness. They also exhibit very strong misogynistic traits and are extremely aggressive and threatening to women. There are many instances of many paraphilias within the trans community. Of course not all of them but enough to have concerns.
Your point about sexuality is that many homosexuals bitterly resent being lumped in with the rainbow crowd and can sense a return to the bad old days of blatant homophobia.
My actual point is to critique the way the case is presented. Even our host frames it as “man sent to jail for stating the fact that there are just two sexes of human (skeletons)” – which is completely false.
The charge was the denigration of a group by way of a protected trait. This has nothing to do with the skeleton statement – except that one is in the same post than the other. It is as if I start a fraud by striking a conversation about the weather, get caught in my fraud, get sentenced to jail for my fraud and then everyone complains about the tyrannical government sending me to jail for talking about the weather.
In addition, that guy wasn’t even sentenced to jail time. He chose jail instead of paying – which is a form of protest in my view, since it just costs the public a lot of money.
Once again, I do not condone the prosecution and I don’t agree with the law. The case is bad enough on its own – you don’t have to distort the facts and stretch the truth to make it super-o-mega-terri-bad.
Surely you can’t go to jail in Switzerland for asserting that homosexuals are mentally ill.
In the root comment it is explained that “The expanded racism law invoked by the public prosecutor’s office and the court protects sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual)”. It is basically a law that prohibits making a claim like “All jews are retarded” (I apologize, if this antisemitic example offends). You can substitute all races or sexual orientations for the word jews and the law treats it the same.
I am not a fan of the law and I think it was stretched too far here, but yes you can get fined for “asserting that homosexuals are mentally ill.”
If you don’t want to pay a fine, you can choose to go to jail instead. But jail is not the intended punishment.
It’s shameful that the gay rights movement has been hijacked by trans activists who use institutional power to force compliance. This has nothing to do with the LGB part of the acronym, which of necessity recognizes the reality of biological sex.
No good deed goes unpunished: you put a point of contact in place to enable a good thing, like help truly needy students get the support available, and soon, it becomes a full-time position, then an office, and then a department. We have also seen this type of growth in college DEI and athletics…peripherals that become a distracting self-important focus…oh and of course we cannot overlook the deans’ offices. Count the number of associate, assistant, assistants to the, dean etc in your school. Maybe there is a good reason they are needed: I’m happy to listen to an explanation.
And regarding the good ole days of W&M in loco parentis: yes, I had to visit the dean when I was a day late getting back from Spring break, because I was flying back with my dad from the west to the east coast as he was recovering after several months in an LA hospital from a severe heart attack, and, as often happened in trans-continental travel in the 60’s our plane was delayed. Just like in high school, the dean (actually his secretary who really ran the place) gave me a written excuse which my French Lit prof, a grizzled, retired WW2 Colonel required me to show him, though none of the younger profs cared…was I witnessing a changing of the guarde?
OR…rereading just now, maybe the Crimson opinion piece was snark…a joke a la the Onion. If so, she sure got me! I swear to Ceiling Cat, I just don’t know anymore.
Also regarding the “good ole days of W&M in loco parentis:” In my time at St. Lawrence U., we were allowed 1 cut per course hour; getting ‘overcuts’ meant hours were deducted. If, for example, I cut a 3-hour class 4 times, it became a 2-hour class. By the time I got to the second semester of my senior year, I had to take 21 hours to graduate. Most of my fraternity brothers were taking 6 0r 9 hours that semester. In Paul Anka’s words, ” I did it my way.”
Yes there was such a thing called “absence probation” there. Missing a certain number of classes, or as you say, absence after a holiday, got you on absence probation; if you persisted in your ways you would be suspended for a semester. But did they actually take roll in, say, Chem 101? But you were exempt if you were on Deans List so I’m surprised you had a problem.
They did away with all that after I think my sophomore year.
Thanks Mike. The old guy took roll in French Lit … I had no trouble … just brought him a note from the dean. Sociology prof learned he was supposed to take roll when dean contacted him about a kid in our class who admin had apparently targeted as a trouble maker. And I think that kindly old Mr. Smith took roll in Descriptive Astronomy. I was never close to a sanction so did not know any details other than as my sociology prof wondering out loud why the punitive action for skipping class was full suspension from attending class.
I appreciate your request for DATA regarding the hepatitis B vaccine. I would invite the below from those who are either panicking about or are dismissive of the ACIP decision and whom I thus presume know the answers to these questions:
1) What are the medical justifications for vaccinating against hepatitis B—on the day of birth—those children whose mothers test negative for the disease? How much of this is paternalistic bureaucratic procedure because one fears parents won’t return for follow-up—in other words, a decision based on population assessment rather than on the specific patient in front of the doctor?
2) What is the incidence of hepatitis B in the above population of children, particularly if the parents are not high-risk and are not recent immigrants from a country where the disease is endemic—and from whom horizontal spread is most likely (though far from exclusively)?
3) What is the number needed to vaccinate in the above low-risk population to prevent one death? To prevent one serious complication? If you plan to give me efficacy data, include the absolute risk reduction alongside the relative—and tell me which sub-population of children your data pertains to.
4) When RCT studies were conducted in children, how long did they monitor for side effects? To what degree were studies done on adults taken as substitutes for studies done with children?
5) Given the vaccine has been on the childhood schedule since 1991, why do the vaccine manufacturers still enjoy immunity from legal liability? Is it unreasonable to ask why such immunity is still needed if 35 years of administration shows it both “safe and effective”?
A 1991 article from the NYT is circulating on social media. Here are the opening paragraphs:
“Frustrated by the widespread reluctance of adults to be vaccinated against hepatitis B, a leading cause of serious illness and death, a Federal panel has recommended that all children be vaccinated instead. It is the first time that the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee of the Public Health Service has recommended vaccinating children for a disease whose victims are almost always adults.”
It continues, “‘This approach to immunize children to prevent a serious chronic adult disease has never been tried before,’ said Dr. Harold Margolis, the chief of the hepatitis branch at the Federal Centers for Disease Control.”
You can get it as an infant even if your mother is negative. That is one of the reasons why it is recommended at birth, not just because the mother may have it.
Almost all beyond me, and I can agree that we should be ready to question long-standing procedures. But rates of Hep. B infection in children has fallen sharply with use of the vaccine. The vaccine is given in 3 doses, spaced apart, and so one can see why it might start with newborns where there is a high probability of getting them started while they are in hospital. https://data.wpro.who.int/world-hepatitis-day-2023
Also, from another post I read that the vaccine is well tolerated in newborns, and that watching children come down with the disease is really really tragic. It would be intolerable to change policy if that change resulted in more cases.
Isn’t it also an indirect strategy that promotes herd immunity to protect those with compromised immune systems, as well as establishing early immunity for protection against later exposures?
Hepatitis B virus can cause cirrhosis (chronic liver disease) or liver cancer. Risks are age dependent. About 95 percent of adults infected with hepatitis B virus will recover completely. Children, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable. About 90 percent of infants infected with the virus and 30 percent of 1 to 5-year-olds will develop cirrhosis or liver cancer. In other words, failing to quickly identify infants and children exposed to hepatitis B virus is a ticket to a shortened life.
Let’s see if I can answer this from info picked up over time:
(1) There is less justification for birth-date vaccination of infants whose mothers test negative, BUT (a) not all mothers are tested for hep B, (b) the test for hep B has false negatives, and (c) there are other routes of infection than from the mother. For a basically no-risk vaccination, you can prevent hep B infection;
(2) Incidence – I have no idea, but I am told by reliable sources that the incidence of hep B infections in persons under 30-ish, i.e. from the time the birth-date vaccination became widespread, has dropped precipitously, arguing that birth-date vaccination has been a success;
(3) The NNT is going to go up as the incidence of hep B goes down – I do not regard that as a bad thing. Is there a low-risk population? Part of the problem is that other than actually testing, apparently many persons infected with hep B show no symptoms so whether a given person is infected is hard to tell;
(4) No idea, but clearly neither do you or you wouldn’t be asking me to find out for you. Since the vaccine was approved by the FDA, and recommended by the CDC, in the days before brain-worm man became Secretary of HHS, I think we may safely assume that it underwent two RCTs. More to the point, billions of doses have been administered safely – the details of what studies were done 35+ years ago would seem irrelevant at this point;
(5) Vaccine manufacturers do not enjoy complete immunity from legal liability, they are still liable if the vaccine fails to conform to its approval. The process of compensation for vaccine injury, the so-called Vaccine Court, was established to allow easier compensation for injuries that may reasonably be considered to be due to a vaccine administration rather than requiring litigation against the manufacturer. And considering that there may be multiple manufacturers of any given vaccine, causation against any given manufacturer might be difficult. The Vaccine Court looks only at the injury and the vaccine, not at the manufacturer.
Finally, the consequences of hep B infection can include cirrhosis and liver cancer; which vaccination prevents.
Professionals and professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and others, have spoken out against the decision by brain-worm man’s reconstituted ACIP to make this change, for good reason.
The Opinion piece from the Harvard student is a good match to our Fall schedule and to some of the challenging students that I get. We don’t start on a Monday because of Labor Day. More likely we start on Wednesday. Although that does give time for students to settle into their housing, I find that first week to be pretty worthless and the following week I will see new faces in the room. Slow to start, some never catch up.
Only recently had we started a Fall break in October as a 3 day weekend. The Thursday before that is notoriously difficult with very low attendance unless you have an exam. Inevitably, if I do an exam (the timing is perfect, and who wants an exam after a 3-day vacation?) I will have students wanting to take it late bc they are taking off a day early, and “all my other classes were cancelled”. That simply isn’t true although some unconscionable professors probably do that. Sooo they take it early, right? Right???
The time between the extended Thanksgiving break weekend and final exams is one week, and we can’t have exams then.
Their Indigenous Peoples’ Day is their Fall Break. Only re-named because, well, its Harvard.
“That’s apples and bowling balls, Tony” Obscure Sopranos reference.
So Waymo vehicles are safer than all drivers everywhere, so they will replace limos, taxis, and Ubers ???
Many years ago (before the internet, so no link. I’m going from memory), I read an article about driver safety. A graph was shown, with driver age on the X axis, and number of accidents per so many miles driven on the Y axis. Guess what? Teenagers accident rates was off the chart. Basically, a teenager has about a 100% chance of getting in an accident. After twenty or so, the rate of accidents went way down. The rate stayed low, until the mid seventies, then it went way up again, almost as high as the teenage rate.
In 1989, I got a job managing a small limo company. Once, I spoke with our insurance agent about something a do not recall. She told me that under no circumstances will they insure any drivers under the age of 25. No problem, I was 29, and the other drivers were older than me. So limo companies don’t employ teenagers. I’m fairly certain they do not employ octogenarians either. The two age groups most likely to get in an accident.
I’m also fairly certain that they do not employ the other group at high risk for accidents: Drug addicts, drunks, morons, etc.
So, if you want to compare apples to apples, Waymo needs to conduct a study comparing the safety of their vehicles v professionally driven vehicles. I’ll await the results of that study /s.
Finally, there is the human element. When a passenger wants to take a different route on the fly, yet doesn’t know how to change it in the app, all the have to do is tell me, and I will immediately react. What would a Waymo do.
And then there are all of the tips I make by, wait for it, entertaining passengers, or giving them advice. More than a few people ask about events in town, which restaurant they should visit, etc. Waymos will not be accommodating in this regard.
I apologize if this post is too long, or if I came across as a bit snarky, but my job is on the line.
It is yet one more of many examples of jobs being lost due to AI based technology, and these are happing for both blue collar and white collar positions. Hiring new graduates to be computer programmers is down, bc an AI can do that job. That used to be a promising career track, and now I wonder. I had just heard of a Korean restaurant in town opening, and that was very interesting as I’d heard that the food was great. But then we discovered that the wait staff were robots, gliding up and down the aisles. I feel like boycotting.
Interesting take and I agree. The straight out metrics of accidents in waymo doesn’t take into account MANY variables. THose you mention.
Like “How much is an apartment building doorman worth?” You can save xx bucks a year by firing him but the building will go to crap for many reasons – so there’s a trap you identify Mr. Xcxellken of overvaluing one metric. I saw this as a trader quite a bit.
What a strange comment! You don’t care about lives saved??? Chances are that you have at least one child or a nephew or niece you are fond of. How would you feel if they got killed by a drunk driver or a driver who was texting while driving?
Yes, driverless driving will destroy jobs. Have you ever heard of “creative destruction”? The term was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). “Creative destruction is a concept in economics that describes a process in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations.” It’s the essence of capitalism. Capitalism has made us rich.
What’s the alternative? An economic system where there is no change because someone would lose their job. That does not sound attractive. Should we ban AI because it reduceds demand for computer programmers?
You’re right, Peter. I shouldn’t have written that I don’t care about lives saved. I don’t even mean that. I do feel for people losing their livelihoods. Forgive my casual, careless speech, if you can.
IMO, the pending AI™-related mass un-/under-employment will be a painful transition into what is currently considered to be a social-welfare state. Labour costs in many industries will go down significantly (sometimes to zero); this is explicitly promoted by the AI™ biz as a major benefit of this “great replacement”. The screamingly blatant injustice of this, that some of “us” are being made very much more rich at the obvious direct cost to many of “us”, will lead to either a lot of violence, or a revised “social compact”, or maybe both.
I currently favour UBI as a resolution to this. YMMV.
Too see UBI in action for the idleness that results when there is no work to do, just visit any Canadian Indian Reserve. Yes, if all the wealth goes to a few innovators who need no human hands or brains and the rest of us are sent to the scap heap, a UBI will be necessary to make us docile and not hungry enough to riot. But the dysfunction won’t be pretty. UBI recipients aren’t going to create innovative musical or fine art forms freed from the drudgery of making a living at them. They’re just going to be drunk all the time. I don’t think aboriginal people are fundamentally different from the rest of us. They were once proud, too.
You probably read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, …the Reeks and the Wrecks.
I’m taking your side in this, Debi. You were replying specifically to XCXellKen who, as a professional driver, was making a case that self-driving cars are not safer than he is. SDCs are safer than human drivers taken in aggregate but crashes are highly concentrated among the young and the old, plus the drunk, high, showing off, and texting drivers. As a professional driver he knows these statistics. He makes a good case that the few lives likely to be saved by eliminating professional drivers like himself, who have for-hire driver’s licences to protect, don’t justify the destruction of his livelihood. He should lobby against being taken off the road. I don’t care about theoretical lives saved either until they turn into actual proven lives.
Besides, when I am told I can no longer drive my own car because I’m not as safe as WayMo, someone needs to be able to drive me around when the roads are slippery and snow-covered, which self-driving cars can’t cope with yet. Their LiDARs can’t even see through the fog of snowflakes, much less follow lane boundaries unless a car in front has laid down some tracks, and if those tracks head off into the ditch, so will the SCD. They struggle (as humans do) to cope with the unpredictable traction on gradations between snow and ice. Not much progress has been made in this domain in at least four years, going by YouTube videos claiming that Winter WayMo is just around the corner.
PPC(E) writes: “My view is that everyone who does this should have their case adjudicate by the law rather than being snatched up and put on a plane.”
I agree.. but I think that’d be a more perfect and unaffordable world.
The “snatched/plane” thing isn’t good – and typically dickish Trump, but fewer than Obama deportations so we’re talking about similar things.
My (limited) experience of immigration court suggests the sheer numbers of defendants with identical stories/cases make it impossible to get to that level of legal protection you’d prefer – (which US cits deserve) – within current budgeting.
Current deportations are expensive enough, and the defendants here are not facing criminal sanctions (just… “Go Home”) We don’t want to snarl our system horribly, denying justice to more nuanced and/or genuine cases.
Remember – this isn’t “criminal” law tho the defendants/aliens are …. sorta criminals. Often actual criminals (if they’re re-entering the US). It is a hard dissection, even for attorneys.
—Love the “speed of dogs/cat” tiktok!
best,
D.A.
NYC
In partial answer to your first question (the second part i wont address as it is a baited question and I’m not biting).
“What are the medical justifications for vaccinating against hepatitis B—on the day of birth—those children whose mothers test negative for the disease:
Doug, these kinds of questions are good and appropriate but they can’t be answered easily, and that, sometimes, is why they’re asked; it is too difficult to answer easy. I remember in the bad omde days of the AIDs epidemic when morons like Kerry Muliss (he is proof that Nobel Prizes CAN go to idiots) who claimed HIV doesn’t exist because there wasn’t a single paper that showed it.
Anyway, once more into the breach (I’ll only try your first for the reasons cited above).
As early as 2001 studies have shown that not only is the Hep B vax safe and effective, it significantly reduced the risk of contracting hepatitis is older children. It used to take a series of shots to establish immunity, but now I believe it only takes a couple. The recommendation for vax at birth is world-wide and was established because of the high risk of transmission from infected mothers to their babies, coupled with uncertain viral status (in much of the world, including the US many, if not most, people infected do not know it). This is important because acute viral hepatitis is a major cause of morbidity in older adolescents and adults, and infection at this age results in worse acute clinical disease.
Does the newborn of a non-infected mother need the shot? My guess is probably not. It can wait. Not all pregnant mothers will get tested even though it’s commonly done in the US. But it’s wrong to say there’s no evidence of benefit; that’s been established for years.
So despite the clearly intimated accusations of malfeasance, from the anti-vaxxers, it’s simply not true that there is no evidence of benefit. Everyone knows, or ought to anyway, that there are cost benefits that are weighed. I think the RFK acolytes are acting out of obsequiousness to their dear leader and have an ulterior motive. We all know what that is.
Re Kerry Muliss — to be fair, his Nobel for PCR acknowledges its massive contributions to both theoretical and practical efforts, not KM’s other activities. He is emphatically not an idiot.
Re Kerry Mullis, maybe one might describe him as a notoriety seeker and some sort of contrarian. Definitely very smart, but wrong in a lot of his pronouncements outside of what he actually accomplished He made a critical contribution with PCR, certainly! My impression is that he seemed to revel in some sort of uber-smart bad-boy status.
Believing that RFK Jr.’s real intention is to get rid of all vaccinations, or at least cut them way back…
I think it’s more nefarious than that. Junior’s an atty. I think the objective is to pull the rug out from under VAERS and facilitate lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, which will help line his pockets as head of that antivaxx group.
Thank you Mr. H.
“Environmental lawyer” sounds great, eh? Erin Brockowitch (sp?) – savin’ the babes from mean Mr. Burns poisoners.
No.
Actually… it is more often an ambulance chaser at scale. Looking for random variations (“cancer clusters” anybody?) to shake down deep pockets: corps, state funds, insurance cos.
And his vax “policy” evinces to me… further… RFK is a deeply dangerous person who will kill thousands to enrich himself personally.
I’ve learnt there are really some people for whom there is no moral bottom.
FWIW (which is very little), the green bars in the ICE arrest chart look blue to me. Since I do sometimes get this wrong (some blue-green colour-blindness), I sampled the pixels: RGB colour 92,122,131 — somewhat more B than G.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A timid question will always receive a confident answer. -Charles John Darling, lawyer, judge, and politician (6 Dec 1849-1936)
If you would like more information about the Emanuel Brünisholz case, I have included a link to an article here. The relevant section regarding his conviction is as follows: “In December 2022, Brünisholz wrote the following comment under a Facebook post by SVP National Council member Andreas Glarner: ‘If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you will only find men and women based on the skeletons; everything else is a mental illness that has been brought up by the curriculum!’
Eight months later, Brünisholz was questioned by the police, and in September 2023, the public prosecutor’s office issued him with a penalty order. “Through his comment posted on Facebook, the accused publicly disparaged the LGBT(Q)I community on the basis of their sexual orientation in a manner that violated human dignity,” it said.”
[…]
Legally, the ruling is not without controversy. The expanded racism law invoked by the public prosecutor’s office and the court protects sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual), but not gender identity (whether one feels like a man, woman, or something else). This was a deliberate decision by parliament. Brünisholz’s Facebook comment is clearly directed against transgender people and therefore concerns gender identity. Nevertheless, the judiciary ruled that this was punishable by law.
https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/wegen-trans-beleidigung-ins-gefaengnis-fall-aus-der-schweiz-sorgt-fuer-aufsehen-ld.1914798
From a fine to jail. I believe it was Ludwig von Mises who observed that “behind every government action is the threat of violence.”
Judicial activism is destroying Europe.
It is absolutely shameful that anybody gets punished for stating the truth. From the down under perspective this was a small fine.
In Australia a lady was fined $95,000 for pointing out the truth of 2 men who were playing in the women’s soccer team.
https://x.com/KirralieS/status/1996731443264037335?s=20
A photo of one of the chaps that claimed vilification. The media are very circumspect in only displaying in what looks like filtered head shots of him and never photos of him looming in size over the girls. That would be far too obvious to see the truth of the matter.
https://www.outinperth.com/riley-dennis-speaks-about-her-experience-of-being-vilified-by-binary/
The judiciary in Australia seem to have much in common with European courts, only they give bigger fines.
It is such an Orwellian approach to fine people for trusting and stating what their eyes have seen.
Orwellian indeed:
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
While I don’t agree with the judgment, je was not put on trial for telling the truth about skeletons but for saying / implying that transgender identity is a mental illness. That is a huge distinction. It was handled the same way as if someone would publicly assert that homosexuals are mentally ill.
His attitude that gender confused people are in fact mentally ill is not unique but is quite possibly shared by many. A strong society would allow for such discussions especially if the phenomena is true as it has nothing to fear. It is when you are censored from the top down that problems can ensue. If this was a grass roots driven movement there would be no need for the judiciary to be involved in the punishment.
The problem is that gender identity is poorly, if at all, defined and remains a nebulous quality. It could be an imaginary concept since it is completely unfalsifiable.
Many of the trans women , especially the older ones, do seem to be autogynephiles and it would not be unseemly to say that they have a mental illness. They also exhibit very strong misogynistic traits and are extremely aggressive and threatening to women. There are many instances of many paraphilias within the trans community. Of course not all of them but enough to have concerns.
Your point about sexuality is that many homosexuals bitterly resent being lumped in with the rainbow crowd and can sense a return to the bad old days of blatant homophobia.
My actual point is to critique the way the case is presented. Even our host frames it as “man sent to jail for stating the fact that there are just two sexes of human (skeletons)” – which is completely false.
The charge was the denigration of a group by way of a protected trait. This has nothing to do with the skeleton statement – except that one is in the same post than the other. It is as if I start a fraud by striking a conversation about the weather, get caught in my fraud, get sentenced to jail for my fraud and then everyone complains about the tyrannical government sending me to jail for talking about the weather.
In addition, that guy wasn’t even sentenced to jail time. He chose jail instead of paying – which is a form of protest in my view, since it just costs the public a lot of money.
Once again, I do not condone the prosecution and I don’t agree with the law. The case is bad enough on its own – you don’t have to distort the facts and stretch the truth to make it super-o-mega-terri-bad.
Surely you can’t go to jail in Switzerland for asserting that homosexuals are mentally ill.
In the root comment it is explained that “The expanded racism law invoked by the public prosecutor’s office and the court protects sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual)”. It is basically a law that prohibits making a claim like “All jews are retarded” (I apologize, if this antisemitic example offends). You can substitute all races or sexual orientations for the word jews and the law treats it the same.
I am not a fan of the law and I think it was stretched too far here, but yes you can get fined for “asserting that homosexuals are mentally ill.”
If you don’t want to pay a fine, you can choose to go to jail instead. But jail is not the intended punishment.
It’s shameful that the gay rights movement has been hijacked by trans activists who use institutional power to force compliance. This has nothing to do with the LGB part of the acronym, which of necessity recognizes the reality of biological sex.
Thanks for Nellie and the The Atlantic article. But even closer to PCC(E)’s home is a similar story in the Chicago Maroon, the UChicago student paper at
https://chicagomaroon.com/49581/news/as-student-accommodation-requests-increase-student-disability-services-expands-and-student-advocates-push-for-greater-awareness/
No good deed goes unpunished: you put a point of contact in place to enable a good thing, like help truly needy students get the support available, and soon, it becomes a full-time position, then an office, and then a department. We have also seen this type of growth in college DEI and athletics…peripherals that become a distracting self-important focus…oh and of course we cannot overlook the deans’ offices. Count the number of associate, assistant, assistants to the, dean etc in your school. Maybe there is a good reason they are needed: I’m happy to listen to an explanation.
And regarding the good ole days of W&M in loco parentis: yes, I had to visit the dean when I was a day late getting back from Spring break, because I was flying back with my dad from the west to the east coast as he was recovering after several months in an LA hospital from a severe heart attack, and, as often happened in trans-continental travel in the 60’s our plane was delayed. Just like in high school, the dean (actually his secretary who really ran the place) gave me a written excuse which my French Lit prof, a grizzled, retired WW2 Colonel required me to show him, though none of the younger profs cared…was I witnessing a changing of the guarde?
OR…rereading just now, maybe the Crimson opinion piece was snark…a joke a la the Onion. If so, she sure got me! I swear to Ceiling Cat, I just don’t know anymore.
Also regarding the “good ole days of W&M in loco parentis:” In my time at St. Lawrence U., we were allowed 1 cut per course hour; getting ‘overcuts’ meant hours were deducted. If, for example, I cut a 3-hour class 4 times, it became a 2-hour class. By the time I got to the second semester of my senior year, I had to take 21 hours to graduate. Most of my fraternity brothers were taking 6 0r 9 hours that semester. In Paul Anka’s words, ” I did it my way.”
Wow. And I bet profs were required to take roll each class period.
Yes there was such a thing called “absence probation” there. Missing a certain number of classes, or as you say, absence after a holiday, got you on absence probation; if you persisted in your ways you would be suspended for a semester. But did they actually take roll in, say, Chem 101? But you were exempt if you were on Deans List so I’m surprised you had a problem.
They did away with all that after I think my sophomore year.
Thanks Mike. The old guy took roll in French Lit … I had no trouble … just brought him a note from the dean. Sociology prof learned he was supposed to take roll when dean contacted him about a kid in our class who admin had apparently targeted as a trouble maker. And I think that kindly old Mr. Smith took roll in Descriptive Astronomy. I was never close to a sanction so did not know any details other than as my sociology prof wondering out loud why the punitive action for skipping class was full suspension from attending class.
I appreciate your request for DATA regarding the hepatitis B vaccine. I would invite the below from those who are either panicking about or are dismissive of the ACIP decision and whom I thus presume know the answers to these questions:
1) What are the medical justifications for vaccinating against hepatitis B—on the day of birth—those children whose mothers test negative for the disease? How much of this is paternalistic bureaucratic procedure because one fears parents won’t return for follow-up—in other words, a decision based on population assessment rather than on the specific patient in front of the doctor?
2) What is the incidence of hepatitis B in the above population of children, particularly if the parents are not high-risk and are not recent immigrants from a country where the disease is endemic—and from whom horizontal spread is most likely (though far from exclusively)?
3) What is the number needed to vaccinate in the above low-risk population to prevent one death? To prevent one serious complication? If you plan to give me efficacy data, include the absolute risk reduction alongside the relative—and tell me which sub-population of children your data pertains to.
4) When RCT studies were conducted in children, how long did they monitor for side effects? To what degree were studies done on adults taken as substitutes for studies done with children?
5) Given the vaccine has been on the childhood schedule since 1991, why do the vaccine manufacturers still enjoy immunity from legal liability? Is it unreasonable to ask why such immunity is still needed if 35 years of administration shows it both “safe and effective”?
A 1991 article from the NYT is circulating on social media. Here are the opening paragraphs:
“Frustrated by the widespread reluctance of adults to be vaccinated against hepatitis B, a leading cause of serious illness and death, a Federal panel has recommended that all children be vaccinated instead. It is the first time that the Immunization Practices Advisory Committee of the Public Health Service has recommended vaccinating children for a disease whose victims are almost always adults.”
It continues, “‘This approach to immunize children to prevent a serious chronic adult disease has never been tried before,’ said Dr. Harold Margolis, the chief of the hepatitis branch at the Federal Centers for Disease Control.”
Fascinating history.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/01/us/us-panel-urges-that-all-children-be-vaccinated-for-hepatitis-b.html
+1
You can get it as an infant even if your mother is negative. That is one of the reasons why it is recommended at birth, not just because the mother may have it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0te4s2f6KFI
Almost all beyond me, and I can agree that we should be ready to question long-standing procedures. But rates of Hep. B infection in children has fallen sharply with use of the vaccine. The vaccine is given in 3 doses, spaced apart, and so one can see why it might start with newborns where there is a high probability of getting them started while they are in hospital.
https://data.wpro.who.int/world-hepatitis-day-2023
Also, from another post I read that the vaccine is well tolerated in newborns, and that watching children come down with the disease is really really tragic. It would be intolerable to change policy if that change resulted in more cases.
Isn’t it also an indirect strategy that promotes herd immunity to protect those with compromised immune systems, as well as establishing early immunity for protection against later exposures?
More info here:
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/jumping-without-a-net
Excerpt:
Hepatitis B virus can cause cirrhosis (chronic liver disease) or liver cancer. Risks are age dependent. About 95 percent of adults infected with hepatitis B virus will recover completely. Children, on the other hand, are far more vulnerable. About 90 percent of infants infected with the virus and 30 percent of 1 to 5-year-olds will develop cirrhosis or liver cancer. In other words, failing to quickly identify infants and children exposed to hepatitis B virus is a ticket to a shortened life.
Let’s see if I can answer this from info picked up over time:
(1) There is less justification for birth-date vaccination of infants whose mothers test negative, BUT (a) not all mothers are tested for hep B, (b) the test for hep B has false negatives, and (c) there are other routes of infection than from the mother. For a basically no-risk vaccination, you can prevent hep B infection;
(2) Incidence – I have no idea, but I am told by reliable sources that the incidence of hep B infections in persons under 30-ish, i.e. from the time the birth-date vaccination became widespread, has dropped precipitously, arguing that birth-date vaccination has been a success;
(3) The NNT is going to go up as the incidence of hep B goes down – I do not regard that as a bad thing. Is there a low-risk population? Part of the problem is that other than actually testing, apparently many persons infected with hep B show no symptoms so whether a given person is infected is hard to tell;
(4) No idea, but clearly neither do you or you wouldn’t be asking me to find out for you. Since the vaccine was approved by the FDA, and recommended by the CDC, in the days before brain-worm man became Secretary of HHS, I think we may safely assume that it underwent two RCTs. More to the point, billions of doses have been administered safely – the details of what studies were done 35+ years ago would seem irrelevant at this point;
(5) Vaccine manufacturers do not enjoy complete immunity from legal liability, they are still liable if the vaccine fails to conform to its approval. The process of compensation for vaccine injury, the so-called Vaccine Court, was established to allow easier compensation for injuries that may reasonably be considered to be due to a vaccine administration rather than requiring litigation against the manufacturer. And considering that there may be multiple manufacturers of any given vaccine, causation against any given manufacturer might be difficult. The Vaccine Court looks only at the injury and the vaccine, not at the manufacturer.
Finally, the consequences of hep B infection can include cirrhosis and liver cancer; which vaccination prevents.
Professionals and professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and others, have spoken out against the decision by brain-worm man’s reconstituted ACIP to make this change, for good reason.
The Opinion piece from the Harvard student is a good match to our Fall schedule and to some of the challenging students that I get. We don’t start on a Monday because of Labor Day. More likely we start on Wednesday. Although that does give time for students to settle into their housing, I find that first week to be pretty worthless and the following week I will see new faces in the room. Slow to start, some never catch up.
Only recently had we started a Fall break in October as a 3 day weekend. The Thursday before that is notoriously difficult with very low attendance unless you have an exam. Inevitably, if I do an exam (the timing is perfect, and who wants an exam after a 3-day vacation?) I will have students wanting to take it late bc they are taking off a day early, and “all my other classes were cancelled”. That simply isn’t true although some unconscionable professors probably do that. Sooo they take it early, right? Right???
The time between the extended Thanksgiving break weekend and final exams is one week, and we can’t have exams then.
Their Indigenous Peoples’ Day is their Fall Break. Only re-named because, well, its Harvard.
Full Disclosure: I drive for a living.
“That’s apples and bowling balls, Tony” Obscure Sopranos reference.
So Waymo vehicles are safer than all drivers everywhere, so they will replace limos, taxis, and Ubers ???
Many years ago (before the internet, so no link. I’m going from memory), I read an article about driver safety. A graph was shown, with driver age on the X axis, and number of accidents per so many miles driven on the Y axis. Guess what? Teenagers accident rates was off the chart. Basically, a teenager has about a 100% chance of getting in an accident. After twenty or so, the rate of accidents went way down. The rate stayed low, until the mid seventies, then it went way up again, almost as high as the teenage rate.
In 1989, I got a job managing a small limo company. Once, I spoke with our insurance agent about something a do not recall. She told me that under no circumstances will they insure any drivers under the age of 25. No problem, I was 29, and the other drivers were older than me. So limo companies don’t employ teenagers. I’m fairly certain they do not employ octogenarians either. The two age groups most likely to get in an accident.
I’m also fairly certain that they do not employ the other group at high risk for accidents: Drug addicts, drunks, morons, etc.
So, if you want to compare apples to apples, Waymo needs to conduct a study comparing the safety of their vehicles v professionally driven vehicles. I’ll await the results of that study /s.
Finally, there is the human element. When a passenger wants to take a different route on the fly, yet doesn’t know how to change it in the app, all the have to do is tell me, and I will immediately react. What would a Waymo do.
And then there are all of the tips I make by, wait for it, entertaining passengers, or giving them advice. More than a few people ask about events in town, which restaurant they should visit, etc. Waymos will not be accommodating in this regard.
I apologize if this post is too long, or if I came across as a bit snarky, but my job is on the line.
It is yet one more of many examples of jobs being lost due to AI based technology, and these are happing for both blue collar and white collar positions. Hiring new graduates to be computer programmers is down, bc an AI can do that job. That used to be a promising career track, and now I wonder. I had just heard of a Korean restaurant in town opening, and that was very interesting as I’d heard that the food was great. But then we discovered that the wait staff were robots, gliding up and down the aisles. I feel like boycotting.
Interesting take and I agree. The straight out metrics of accidents in waymo doesn’t take into account MANY variables. THose you mention.
Like “How much is an apartment building doorman worth?” You can save xx bucks a year by firing him but the building will go to crap for many reasons – so there’s a trap you identify Mr. Xcxellken of overvaluing one metric. I saw this as a trader quite a bit.
D.A.
NYC
I feel for you. I don’t even care about the “lives saved”. Put a man out of work? I call that ruining his life.
What a strange comment! You don’t care about lives saved??? Chances are that you have at least one child or a nephew or niece you are fond of. How would you feel if they got killed by a drunk driver or a driver who was texting while driving?
Yes, driverless driving will destroy jobs. Have you ever heard of “creative destruction”? The term was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). “Creative destruction is a concept in economics that describes a process in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations.” It’s the essence of capitalism. Capitalism has made us rich.
What’s the alternative? An economic system where there is no change because someone would lose their job. That does not sound attractive. Should we ban AI because it reduceds demand for computer programmers?
You’re right, Peter. I shouldn’t have written that I don’t care about lives saved. I don’t even mean that. I do feel for people losing their livelihoods. Forgive my casual, careless speech, if you can.
IMO, the pending AI™-related mass un-/under-employment will be a painful transition into what is currently considered to be a social-welfare state. Labour costs in many industries will go down significantly (sometimes to zero); this is explicitly promoted by the AI™ biz as a major benefit of this “great replacement”. The screamingly blatant injustice of this, that some of “us” are being made very much more rich at the obvious direct cost to many of “us”, will lead to either a lot of violence, or a revised “social compact”, or maybe both.
I currently favour UBI as a resolution to this. YMMV.
Too see UBI in action for the idleness that results when there is no work to do, just visit any Canadian Indian Reserve. Yes, if all the wealth goes to a few innovators who need no human hands or brains and the rest of us are sent to the scap heap, a UBI will be necessary to make us docile and not hungry enough to riot. But the dysfunction won’t be pretty. UBI recipients aren’t going to create innovative musical or fine art forms freed from the drudgery of making a living at them. They’re just going to be drunk all the time. I don’t think aboriginal people are fundamentally different from the rest of us. They were once proud, too.
You probably read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, …the Reeks and the Wrecks.
I’m taking your side in this, Debi. You were replying specifically to XCXellKen who, as a professional driver, was making a case that self-driving cars are not safer than he is. SDCs are safer than human drivers taken in aggregate but crashes are highly concentrated among the young and the old, plus the drunk, high, showing off, and texting drivers. As a professional driver he knows these statistics. He makes a good case that the few lives likely to be saved by eliminating professional drivers like himself, who have for-hire driver’s licences to protect, don’t justify the destruction of his livelihood. He should lobby against being taken off the road. I don’t care about theoretical lives saved either until they turn into actual proven lives.
Besides, when I am told I can no longer drive my own car because I’m not as safe as WayMo, someone needs to be able to drive me around when the roads are slippery and snow-covered, which self-driving cars can’t cope with yet. Their LiDARs can’t even see through the fog of snowflakes, much less follow lane boundaries unless a car in front has laid down some tracks, and if those tracks head off into the ditch, so will the SCD. They struggle (as humans do) to cope with the unpredictable traction on gradations between snow and ice. Not much progress has been made in this domain in at least four years, going by YouTube videos claiming that Winter WayMo is just around the corner.
https://www.changinglanesnewsletter.com/p/automated-driving-in-winter-conditions
So if XCXellKen moves to the snowbelt he will never want for work in winter (which we get about eight months a year of.)
PPC(E) writes: “My view is that everyone who does this should have their case adjudicate by the law rather than being snatched up and put on a plane.”
I agree.. but I think that’d be a more perfect and unaffordable world.
The “snatched/plane” thing isn’t good – and typically dickish Trump, but fewer than Obama deportations so we’re talking about similar things.
My (limited) experience of immigration court suggests the sheer numbers of defendants with identical stories/cases make it impossible to get to that level of legal protection you’d prefer – (which US cits deserve) – within current budgeting.
Current deportations are expensive enough, and the defendants here are not facing criminal sanctions (just… “Go Home”) We don’t want to snarl our system horribly, denying justice to more nuanced and/or genuine cases.
Remember – this isn’t “criminal” law tho the defendants/aliens are …. sorta criminals. Often actual criminals (if they’re re-entering the US). It is a hard dissection, even for attorneys.
—Love the “speed of dogs/cat” tiktok!
best,
D.A.
NYC
In partial answer to your first question (the second part i wont address as it is a baited question and I’m not biting).
“What are the medical justifications for vaccinating against hepatitis B—on the day of birth—those children whose mothers test negative for the disease:
Doug, these kinds of questions are good and appropriate but they can’t be answered easily, and that, sometimes, is why they’re asked; it is too difficult to answer easy. I remember in the bad omde days of the AIDs epidemic when morons like Kerry Muliss (he is proof that Nobel Prizes CAN go to idiots) who claimed HIV doesn’t exist because there wasn’t a single paper that showed it.
Anyway, once more into the breach (I’ll only try your first for the reasons cited above).
As early as 2001 studies have shown that not only is the Hep B vax safe and effective, it significantly reduced the risk of contracting hepatitis is older children. It used to take a series of shots to establish immunity, but now I believe it only takes a couple. The recommendation for vax at birth is world-wide and was established because of the high risk of transmission from infected mothers to their babies, coupled with uncertain viral status (in much of the world, including the US many, if not most, people infected do not know it). This is important because acute viral hepatitis is a major cause of morbidity in older adolescents and adults, and infection at this age results in worse acute clinical disease.
Does the newborn of a non-infected mother need the shot? My guess is probably not. It can wait. Not all pregnant mothers will get tested even though it’s commonly done in the US. But it’s wrong to say there’s no evidence of benefit; that’s been established for years.
So despite the clearly intimated accusations of malfeasance, from the anti-vaxxers, it’s simply not true that there is no evidence of benefit. Everyone knows, or ought to anyway, that there are cost benefits that are weighed. I think the RFK acolytes are acting out of obsequiousness to their dear leader and have an ulterior motive. We all know what that is.
Here’s a paper from two decades ago which addresses this: https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1754.2001.00639.
Thank you for the questions. Best.
Re Kerry Muliss — to be fair, his Nobel for PCR acknowledges its massive contributions to both theoretical and practical efforts, not KM’s other activities. He is emphatically not an idiot.
Re Kerry Mullis, maybe one might describe him as a notoriety seeker and some sort of contrarian. Definitely very smart, but wrong in a lot of his pronouncements outside of what he actually accomplished He made a critical contribution with PCR, certainly! My impression is that he seemed to revel in some sort of uber-smart bad-boy status.
Believing that RFK Jr.’s real intention is to get rid of all vaccinations, or at least cut them way back…
I think it’s more nefarious than that. Junior’s an atty. I think the objective is to pull the rug out from under VAERS and facilitate lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, which will help line his pockets as head of that antivaxx group.
Thank you Mr. H.
“Environmental lawyer” sounds great, eh? Erin Brockowitch (sp?) – savin’ the babes from mean Mr. Burns poisoners.
No.
Actually… it is more often an ambulance chaser at scale. Looking for random variations (“cancer clusters” anybody?) to shake down deep pockets: corps, state funds, insurance cos.
And his vax “policy” evinces to me… further… RFK is a deeply dangerous person who will kill thousands to enrich himself personally.
I’ve learnt there are really some people for whom there is no moral bottom.
D.A.
NYC
FWIW (which is very little), the green bars in the ICE arrest chart look blue to me. Since I do sometimes get this wrong (some blue-green colour-blindness), I sampled the pixels: RGB colour 92,122,131 — somewhat more B than G.