Super duper hype fast FET driver?

And your example countries are?

The only countries that I've adduced - France versus the Netherlands, has the less permisive Frence regime stuck with a slightly worse drug problem than the more permissive Netherlands.

The US has a bigger drug problem than either, and its the world leader in the - misconceived - "war on drugs".

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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It would probably have to be pretty invasive to be particularly effective, but self-consistency is always to be recommended, even if it doesn't actually minimise damage.

Getting excited about the damage drug addicts do to themselves while ignoring the way food addicts wreck their health is distinctly silly.

The only thing that really does seem to help with obesity is surgical adjustments of the stomach and the top of the digestive system and that is seriously invasive. If we get a better grip on the way appetite control works in people who don't get fat - and fails to work in people who do - we may come up with less invasive treatments that do work, but it may take a while.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So?

My wife gave up cigarettes many years ago, but she remains addicted to coffee. Tobacco clearly does more harm than coffee, so people get less upset about the dealers who make money from selling coffee, but they are equally guilty of "professional predation' in the sense of exploiting a human weakness for their own profit.

Most of them have - however - noticed that modern advertising techniques can increase demand. Nobody seems to have seriously tried to use the same techniques to reduce demand. The "Just Say No" campaing may have been conceived as a step in that direction but the campaign money doesn't seem to have been spent on buying even minimally competent advertising talent.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But you seem to be perfectly happy to let professional purveyors of financially advantageous mis-information prey on people with a limited capacity for critical thinking.

In fact you seem to think that denialist propaganda miniminising the dangers of persisting anhtropogenic global warming is some kind of useful public service, rather than a cynical exercise by the fossil- carbon extraction industry designed to let them keep on digging up and selling fossil-carbon until the damage it causes is blatant enough to be undeniable.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But you haven't persuaded the FBI to arrest them and lock them up in prison for decades, as you would be doing if your policies against dangerous addictive drugs were even vaguely internally consistent.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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drugs.

How do you suggest I persuade the FBI to do that?

Moron.

John

That's just... no, self-consistency is only useful in the service of a well established set of principles. Even then, the result may well be Mandarinism.

You cannot impute proper behavior from first or even second order principles. Life is not a theorem. A theorem is arguably the least ... interesting form of knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I like theorems in the proper context, but people are far too complex to be tractable in that manner.

I could not have provided a better example of purist mandarin technocracy if asked. You *just don't know enough*, Bill. Not "you" you - nobody does. What's it like in there? Nobody knows.

And it's not like the people who do work with things like nutrition standards can really be reliable - they don't know what your system works like.

So howzabout we ignore both of those unless we have a personal stake in it? Is that so hard?

My personal experience was a doctor ready to put me on statins when I have never had high cholesterol in my life. *Low* cholesterol. I made her get a different test at a different lab, and sonofagun, the first test was off a lot.

No! I actually have a friend who has beaten morbid obesity, and that was not the right thing to do at all. He's taken a *specific* dietary regime ( which doesn't include carbs, interestingly enough - so his glucose and insulin levels are amazing ) and very specific exercise.

That's like "gee, kinda looks like plumbing in there, don't it Bob? Lets put a flow restrictor in."

No! It's a control/feedback problem and that's how it has been managed in his case. it works. it was terrifyingly difficult, and may fail at any moment.

You and I are among the first or second generation that *has never really been hungry*. It's all outta calibration in there. Doesn't that make more sense?

I can't disagree there. But when people mare some sort of Social Darwinist... or even moderately Dickensian approach, it's just plain wrong.

Again: we know *very little* about either of these problems. If you use the right angle on it, they may not really even *be* problems, At least not problems for which there is a general public goods solution.

-- Les Cargill

You are very tedious and very stupid, and have very little to say about electronics.

John

So yeah. Until the feds get involved...

Cigarettes didn't do that much harm either. That was never the point. The people who put the Surgeon's General report more or less admitted that - they could quantify it only at a level of rough order of magnitude. If you died of something they'd kill you with, you had at most a 50% chance of the smokes having actually caused it. This against specific pathologies with mortality rates in the 20% range.

Chemotherapy has much higher mortality rates.

*Of course* people who could quit should, but it's not like the epidemiology of it all really ever made sense. That didn't matter; there was a narrative and that replaced facts.

People lived in houses painted with lead paint, with asbestos fireproofing, coal heating, in cities with massive quantities of lead from ethyl gasoline. They worked in machine shops with particulates at ... many times the "safe" level, or with chemicals like methylene chloride.

Prior to say, what, 1950, nobody even *thought* about this stuff. Probably later.

Or not. Modern advertising is largely playing to an empty room.

Gee, I ran into some druggies when young and they were the best "Just Say No" thing I ever ran into. Worked like a champ.

Lenny Bruce was full of it.

-- Les Cargill

All one must really do is note that fossil fuels replaced

*slavery* in our civilization. One can admit all manner of horrible things caused by them, but that's the basis of a pretty compelling reductio ad absurbum.

Whether it's true or not is almost beside the point.

-- Les Cargill

Lenny Bruce died of a morphine overdose, most likely self-administered.

"He was also a jailtime regular for drug-related offenses, heroin and morphine chief among them."

Hardly an objective observer.

John

Technology in general and fossil fuels in particular changed our world. Unions take credit for "the weekend" but it was actually engineers, and productivity, that changed civilization.

John

And a bit more engineering - and a lot of investment in renewable energy generation - could change it again and give us a sustainable economy.

We can keep on burning fossil carbon like there's no tomorrow for another couple of decades but our children won't be happy about the consequences.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Actually, you need to note that energy replace slavery in our civilisation. At the moment quite a lot of that energy is being generated by burning fossil carbon, but ti also comes from nuclear plants, hydro-electric power schemes and wind-mills, as well as the odd solar-powered generating plant.

We don't need to stop using energy just because burning fossil-carbon has bad long term consequences, and it looks very much as if we could replace most of it with solar power in a few decades if we set out minds to it.

The absurdity resides in the proposition that burning fossil carbon is the only way of generating energy - it's not. A more rational argument might object to a possible reduction in living standards if we went over to more expensive solar power generation to replace it, but we only spend 8% of our GNP on energy at the moment, and while going over to solar power - at twice the price - would put a crimp in the economy if it happened tomorrow, the changeover has to be spread over a decade or two, and by the time the installed base of solar power generators approaches he capacity of the fossil-powered generating plant, the economies of scale on the vastly increased production of solar power generators will have made solar power cheaper than fossil-carbon generated power anyway, even if OPEC hasn't jacked up the price of oil in the meantime.

The professional purveyors of financially advantageous mis- information to people with a limited capacity for critical thinking do seem to have fed you a load of codswallop. Try think about what is actually going on, rather than uncritically absorbing and regurgitating denialist propaganda.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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None of which is either true or relevant, but while John Larkin objects to the abuse he thinks he gets in other poeoples posts, he does seem to think that it is perfectly okay for him to dish it out when he can't come up with a snappy one-liner.

Reasoned counter-argument does seem to be quite beyond him. He probably wouldn't be much good at it if he tried, but I doubt that we will ever find out.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They cause - and are causing - quite a few people to die earlier than they would have done if they had never smoked - about 14 years earlier. This strikes me as "harm"

So what. Non-smokers get lung cancer, and some smokers who get lung cancer would have got it even if they hadn't smoked, but if you smoke you've got at least ten times the chance of getting lung cancer. Correlation isn't causation, but we've got a pretty good idea of how smoking makes it more likely that you'll get lug cancer.

Of course. You get chemotherapy after you have developed cancer will kill you if you don't get chemotherapy, and the optimum level of chemotherapy is going to have an appreciable chance of killing you before it kills the cancer. It's not a comparable situation.

If it didn't make sense to you, you didn't study the right texts.

Nonsense.

Both smokers and non-smokers.The smokers were more a lot likely to die of lug cancer.

In 1912, American Dr. Isaac Adler was the first to strongly suggest that lung cancer is related to smoking. In 1929, Fritz Lickint of Dresden, Germany, published a formal statistical evidence of a lung cancer-tobacco link, based on a study showing that lung cancer sufferers were likely to be smokers.In 1950, Richard Doll published research in the British Medical Journal showing a close link between smoking and lung cancer. This is usually cited as the seminal study.

The comapanies that pay for the advertsing don't think so, and they spedn quite a lot of money testign the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Which is more than you can say for the "Just Say No" campaign.

.

Probably. His official cause of death was "acute morphine poisoning caused by an accidental overdose" though it has been suggested that police may have sexed up the area around his corpse as an act of posthumous revenge.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You, and the people who share your attitude, might have tried writing to your congressman. I haven't yet heard of any public campaign to have the tobacco company executives who paid for the lying pro-tobacco campaign to be put behind bars. Drug-pushers on million dollar salaries don't seem to attract that kind of attnetion.

Clearly you don't know what the word means.

What is moronic is the war on drugs. The Great Experiment proved that prohibition didn't work for alcohol, and the US spent the time since Repeal proving that it doesn't work for other drugs of addiction either. You voted for the nitwits who keep on supporting it anyway, which doesn't make you very bright.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

You were obviously badly disappointed, and I'm sorry about that. A close relative of mine became a Jehovah's Witness, spent about 20 years working very hard at it, and then quit completely when the cultists didn't live up to their own rhetoric. He's now an atheist who dabbles in the occult. That's what's so horrible about cults--their lies can keep people from meeting the God who is there. (I don't know what franchise you folks belonged to--it isn't just cults that can have that effect, unfortunately, and I'm sure it's happened in my franchise too.)

I'm an adult convert myself--I was a mechanistic atheist until about 20 years ago, when I discovered two things. The first was that the mechanistic world view is inherently self-contradictory because it makes thought impossible. The second and much more important is that God really answered my prayers, in ways that I could not possibly have made up because they occurred outside me in very close time synchronization with the prayer, and addressed to the needs and conditions of several people at once. It would have taken way more faith _not_ to believe, at that point. That kind of choreography is one of the footprints of the Holy Spirit. Another is Joy.

And it's been happening for 20 years or more, including some pretty showy stuff, at least by my lights. Mostly, though, it's just what you'd expect from a love relationship--enjoying being together, and missing it when apart. If you're ever in New York, drop by for a beer and I'll tell you about it. God really is amazing, and it has nothing much to do with me or anyone else.

The idea of sin isn't a consequence of monotheism, it's a matter of common observation, and forms part of the data that go into all religion and all psychology whatsoever. The vocabulary is different, but there's nothing in the so-called modern view that's actually new--the idea that evil is merely the result of ignorance of the good is as old as Socrates (400ish BC) and probably much older. It's just wrong, is all.

All it takes to get a good picture of the power of sin is to try obeying your conscience _exactly_ for a month or so. It's impossible, and that's an experimental fact, not a dogma. That's the Bad News that makes the Gospel the Good News--that we aren't stuck there: God has set us free by His sacrifice of Himself in our place.

The idea of the fall is the most pernicious

If you were going to a place that emphasized guilt and duty to the exclusion of grace and freedom, you've been cheated out of the gift.

It has been well said that "in Christianity, salvation is a gift and morality is gratitude." Karmic religion, where we have to save ourselves by struggling, isn't Christian at all. If we try doing that in our own strength, there are only two possible outcomes: exhaustion or hypocrisy. It has to be done in God's strength, or not at all.

As St Paul says to the Corinthians, "...I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me."

That bit in Isaiah 11 about the lion lying down with the fatling is about the restoration of God's first intention, after the end of the present world. It's a promise that the hurts of the world will be healed, and ours along with them. Every wrong will be righted and every tear will be dried. God is the one who restores. Addressed to the Israelites who were slaves in Babylon at the time, it was one of God's ways of proclaiming His love for them, and for us. It isn't about temporal progress or lack of it.

Christianity invented modern science. The whole scientific enterprise rests on the expectation that physical events are regular, i.e. if you repeat an experiment sufficiently carefully, you get the same result as before.

Muslim science was pretty much limited to mathematics and astronomy. If you read Ptolemy's "Almagest' (its Arabic name), you'll find that the classical, Arabic, and medieval European cosmologies all agreed that nothing ever changed above the orbit of the Moon--i.e. that the heavens were mathematical and the Earth was capricious. That's not actually a scientific outlook at all. It was the Judaeo-Christian idea that the apparently capricious world was actually ruled by laws, because it comes from the mind of God, who is "a God of order and not of chaos."

Johannes Kepler said that the greatest thing about his work was "thinking God's thoughts after Him."

Seriously - Europe had even forgotten how to build arches! Europe

Western Europe was repeatedly overrun by wave after wave of bloodthirsty barbarians, from the fourth century to the tenth--Huns, Vandals, Alans, Goths, Vikings, and probably some I've left out. That's why the Dark Ages were dark; Rome didn't fall by itself.

In places where the barbarians were excluded, like Byzantium, or which they missed, like parts of Ireland, the learning was never lost, but treasured and preserved, sometimes under the most difficult circumstances. The rest of the continent was like one big Afghanistan, and for the same reason--there was nothing left standing, and people's minds were focused on survival.

Once they got rid of the Vikings, about 1050ish, the revival of Western Europe was startlingly fast--in the High Middle Ages, not the Renaissance, well before anything much arrived from outside. The development was all in new directions, such as Gothic architecture, courtly love and new music and art that were nothing like their classical models. Chesterton's biography of St. Francis of Assisi is a good read on that point.

for example when

You're identifying Christianity with Western civilization. Christian Byzantium maintained and in some ways extended classical civilization right up to the point where it was sacked and burned by the (Muslim) Turks in 1453--well after the high point of the Italian Renaissance.

As I said, I'm an adult convert, so there's nothing on the outside of the Church that I'm frightened of. It's just that I've met God, and have met other folks who know Him, and that has become the most important thing in my life. It also doesn't require me to believe lies about science, which is the second most important thing to me. (Well, okay, third, after my family.)

1 Corinthians 13:8-13: "Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

The bitterness of your attack, and your repeated references to having 'been there, done that' is what makes me think that there's unforgiveness as well as disappointment. If that's so, it's very dangerous, as I know from hard experience.

I come from a family where there was a fair amount of unforgiveness, and I've seen what it can do--I came along after most of the causes had blown over, and even so it has taken me a long time to get really free of it myself--the only way I know of is by praying continually for my enemies. Periodically I discover some more, so it's a continuing process. Nothing of that sort is completely fixable in this world, but God can turn it to good nonetheless.

I'm sorry that you didn't find God there--unfortunately, not every place with a cross on top is a good place to meet Him. But He's here.

And I'm not aiming any barbs at you, I just think you're wrong about God's relationship with us, and I think that you and some others on this thread are missing something amazing that you could have for free. I've lived on both sides of the fence myself, and God certainly doesn't need me to defend Him. It's a freely offered gift, that we're free to refuse.

I'm not bitter at

You seem to have cared about it very much, at one time. I just want to encourage folks to find a place that's faithful to the Apostolic tradition--the whole tradition, not just the post-1500 tradition, and still less the post-1900 tradition--and soak in it. To worship, and pray, and read Scripture, ideally with some other folks who know God.

God honours all honest seekers--don't give up, and do make sure you've got the real deal. It's out there to be found. (It feels a bit odd at first, talking to a God that one isn't sure is there, but He doesn't leave us in that place.) He's really there. It's really true.

I'd be happy to continue the discussion elsewhere.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

l an

You can't claim to have a rational policy if it isn't self-consistent. That isn't Mandarinism - unless simple rationality is too Mandarin for you.

Who is "imputing behaviour"? Come to think of it, what would imputing proper behavior involve? Proper behavior for the obese obviously involves losing weight, but there don't seem to be any particularly effective ways of inducing that behavior, short of surgical intervention in the gut.

So where did the theorem come from, and what might it consist of?

In where? We certainly don't know how the human appetite/satiation system works. We do know that it works better for some people than others, and we may eventually be able to adjust it so that it works properly for everybody, but that's a long way off and it may turn out to be impossible for at least some of the population.

Some of that information may become accessible when we can read ands interpret individual genomes, but again that's some way off.

It's what I'd advocate. If people really want to do drugs it makes sense to make sure that the drugs they use are pure and the same from one batch to the next. You can discourage them by keeping the price high, but if you make the price too high, drug-smugglers wil sell them less pure and less consistent drugs, which would rather defeat the purpose.

It happens.

Anecdotal evidence isn't a good basis for public policy. Dietary regimes combined with exercise do work for some people, but nowhere near enough to get the Cochrane Collaboration recommend it as a standard evidence-based treatment.

The changes to the plumbing don't explain the effectiveness of the treatment.

It seems that the surgery is a reliable way of managing the control and feedback. Some people have made suggestions about what might be going on but research is on-going.

Not really. Rich people have been able to get fat since we took to living in cities. It used to be a mark of social status, but plenty of the rich and powerful managed to avoid obesity - lokk at their portraits in museums and art galleries.

Agreed. I'm not proposing that society insists on appetite-limiting surgery for the grossly over-weight, just observing that it is the only treatment available that actually works in a useful proportion of cases.

Obesity is certainly a health problem for the people who suffer from it. "On average, obesity reduces life expectancy by six to seven years: a BMI of 30=9635 reduces life expectancy by two to four years, while severe obesity (BMI > 40) reduces life expectancy by 10 years."

It's less damaging than smoking, which shortens life by 14 years on average, but it's certainly not compatible with a long and healthy old age.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen