TinyCO2,

I'm not going to get through to a guy who believes in homeopathy and then bandies the word 'scientism' about.

It is strange that you feel triggered by the word "scientism". Isn't the business of climate alarm heavily based on scientism: doing something that looks like science, and claiming infallability? Of course failure is central to science: trial and error, and learning from the errors. Doctors who move from drug to drug until they find one that improves your symptoms are being scientific. Ones that use drugs to push you towards the centre of some bell curve are being scientistic.

You do seem a bit fixated on homoeopathy. I don't think I've brought it up. As practised, it is silly, but it has its amusing aspects. The name comes from homoeo, "like", and pathia, "disease", the idea being that a weak dose of the thing that causes the disease might cure the disease. Strange idea. Where do you think it came from? I don't know, but think about this: Edward Jenner became famous when he showed that a dose of cowpox, a weak form of poxvirus, conferred immunity against smallpox, a strong form. Was homoeopathy just a naive attempt to generalise vaccination from prevention into cure? Just another cargo cult? Scientism again.

MikeHig,

It wasn't a hint to close the subject, just a little dig at my ongoing "it be, it bain't" argument (as above), like so many other conversations on the web.

Not much to admire in my discipline, but I'll spill my secret. In 2008 I had an inspiration: a "todo" file. I configured F12 to immediately bring up an editor at the bottom of a plain text file called "todo". In it, I would jot down things to do (obviously) marked with a '-' at the beginning of the line. I'd change it to a '+' to mark it done (or delete trivial items). Later, I set up a syntax description so that undone items showed in red, and done items in green. This ridiculously simple idea has been terrific. On phone calls or whatever, as I promise to do things, I tap F12 and jot down the item. No post-it notes to lose, etc., etc. Everything in this one place which I check each morning. And it's easily searched later on.

Later I added an 'o' prefix for items of interest — these come up in blue — and that's how I mark URLs and my brief comments about them for future reference. As far as that part goes, you could do much the same with browser bookmarks but I think they're cumbersome to work with, and they aren't available when you're using a different browser. The todo file grows gradually, but after 14 years it's still under 250k, and it has moved easily from computer to computer when I have upgraded.

So tap F12, type 'o' cut'n'paste the URL, type a brief comment, exit editor. Not that tough a discipline.

tomo,

Not wild keen on airliner analogies for health matters. It's selling an impossible dream. There *is* an ideal B737. It's set down in the specifications. The ideal 737 Max is set down in its specifications too, but they are still evolving as (pretty horrendous) bugs get ironed out. But the builders and maintainers have an ideal to work towards.

There's no ideal human. Each of us is bespoke: different dimensions, wiring and plumbing following different paths, different fluids, etc. If the Olympic athlete is the ideal, does that mean becoming muscular like a sprinter, or trimming down like a marathoner? And neither of them will thank you for pushing them towards the mean.

The upshot is that airliners should be built and maintained with a slavish adherence to rules and standard procedures, but the best doctors will use knowledge and intelligence to treat each patient individually. The adherence to a standard manual, guidelines, etc., suits the bureaucrats and big medicine companies very well, but it's inferior care.

A comment at JoNova's pointed to this biopic on Thomas Sowell, which I found good fun. Liked this quote from him:

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it

The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics

And another comment linked to this article which is pertinent to the thin veneer of civility I mentioned recently.

Tomo, of course nothing is 100% safe and everyone admitted that.

There are good reasons why the pharma companies demanded immunity from prosecution, not least that anyone who gets sick in the next 75 years might try to blame it on the vaccine and demand millions in compensation. Nobody can guarantee 100% that there might not be some side effect that takes years to develop. Governments agreed to take the liability burden or there would be no vaccines.

Until you give mass populations a drug or test people for a lifetime and preferably both, it's hard/impossible to know these things, but the same applies to almost every drug out there. They say that aspirin would never pass modern drug trials and many over the counter drugs are far from 100% safe. Only recently a woman died from an overdose of Lemsip - the key drug being paracetamol.

We don't know the long term effects of covid either. It's long been mooted that diseases can trigger other conditions. HPV we know about but there's growing evidence that basic viruses can trigger type 2 diabetes. It's a popular meme that being too clean causes asthma but more likely the sort of people with asthma didn't survive all the other respiratory diseases long enough to be diagnosed.

Nobody is saying that Big Pharma is innocent of everything it's accused of but like Big Oil, the problems outweigh the rewards. Why the fear of one and not the other?

"I had a short stint years ago in aviation and the "convenient scheduled maintenance stop" pass the parcel game. There, the pilot usually has the final say"

I'm sure while you were surrounded with aviation colleagues with a lifetime of experience you think in your 12 months contracted position you became intimatelly conversant with the volumes of regulations involved in the aviation industry but as your colleagues would have told you it is not a "pass the parcel game"
The pilot will have a say if he picks up an instument issue on the pre flight check
but that is as far as it goes, he has a different skill set.
Your short stint in aviation coupled with your incessant criticism contained in the majority of your posts doesn't allow your mind to contribute a balanced and fair opinion on any subject. You come across as critical on everything, relax.
Have a nice day.

"The Boeing 737 Max was safe until it wasn't - isn't a poor analogy I feel"

Everything is safe until a gremlin or two works through the system including the 25000 commercial aircraft currently in the global fleet and some of those are still flying after decades and decades of use. Aircraft gremlin issues are identified pretty rapid. A few with serious defects are grounded immediately but where possible overcome with a quick fix to keep the planes in the air until a permenent fix is developed and incorporated with the next convenient scheduled maintenance stop. The 737 Max was a serious exception to the rule and took some time to return to the sky.
As for the 11 billion Pfizer vaccine shots already distributed and injected I would expect some unfortunate person to have a reaction to some degree somewhere but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it and it wouldn't stop me having another pfizer booster. Besides you can't compare war time trials of 70 or 80 years ago with current peacetime trails in the same breath. Relax