> but we wanted to avoided giving more than 2 per month so we altered the schedule slightly.
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
Sure. The number 1 thing to understand is that without a clearly defined cause or even a hint of contributory factors for autism (think everything caused cancer or X may increase your risk of heart disease), there is an information vacuum.
Based on that people are left to speculate as to what influences appear to be probable on their own. One of the simplest correlations to make is of course, the sheer volume of vaccines on the schedule and whether the combined effect is creating any impact.
My wife and I went far beyond that and did speak to a retired OB who shared his own career observations with us. His explanation was that people naturally filter heavy metals, like aluminum, out of their systems but some people do it slower than others. Since aluminum is used in many vaccines, he recommended spreading them out to reduce the stress on the body to filter it out.
He went on to explain that he eventually started testing pregnant mothers and identified that when the high levels were often present in the mother, then many children ended up with the same issue. He started recommending a specific prenatal regiment to the expecting mothers to help correct it. Would even go as far as testing couples who were planning to try to have a baby before they were even pregnant.
Make the plastic manufacturers own the external costs by requiring they fund proper disposal sites/messaging, if only to start making up for all the bullshit propaganda about recycling that's greatly exacerbated the problem.
> Make the plastic manufacturers own the external costs by requiring they fund proper disposal sites/messaging,
I think you fail to understand the reality of the problem.
In western countries, plastic "trash" is not really the problem. It's highly visible and it would always be nice to reduce it of course.
The majority of uncontained environmental microplastics comes from vehicle tires and clothing/textiles. Clothing and other textiles (e.g., carpets) being the biggest source, more than 1/3rd. After that it's probably building materials, paints, machinery and factory parts, etc.
Disposal sites and messaging will not do anything. You can be a perfectly compliant goodly consumer who dutifully puts their old clothes in the trash and pays the disposal fees for their old tires or rides busses. You'd still be contributing enormously to environmental microplastic load.
All natural fiber clothes, cycle everywhere, don't wear sneakers or other kind of plastic or synthetic rubber shoes, don't have synthetic carpets or drapes, don't paint your house, etc... now you're starting to get somewhere.
But the machinery required for you to stay alive, moving goods and services around, pumping your water, people going to work to keep your electricity on, package your food, etc... all still pumping out microplastics.
Disposal and messaging just won't cut it. And without a bunch of astounding and vanishingly unlikely breakthroughs, getting rid of microplastics from the top 4-5 sources will make net zero CO2 look like a walk in the park. Therefore we have to accept microplastics at enormous scale and work with that. Not to say we shouldn't attempt to reduce it where possible of course we should, but it won't be reduced to insignificant. So I think what needs to be done is well funded research into the effects of existing and new types of plastics, and into new materials and techniques for cleanup or containment. That way we have a chance to discover and limit or ban the worst of the worst before they can become too pervasive.
As far as reduction goes, possibly some small incentives to avoid plastics in consumer items (clothes, carpets, etc) might help. The messaging really can not be the same idiotic and counterproductive alarmism and blame and guilt campaigns led by wealthy private jet and mega yacht owning billionaires of the climate change debacle. Just gently make people aware they could look for natural fiber clothes, perhaps modest and commensurate added costs on plastics manufacturers to fund this research and containment, etc.
Why not start with the large sources that you can personally control?
> One 2023 study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that microwaving plastic food containers releases more than 2 billion nanoplastics (smaller microplastics) and 4 million microplastics for every square centimeter of the container.
The reason for the reaction is that the random facebook and youtube posts aren't held to the same standard as government and scientific sources.
The moment some people see a single slip up from the latter, they distrust them forever, but you can show study after study debunking autism links, for example, and those same people either disregard the evidence or merely move the goal posts.
In other words: these people are intellectually dishonest. They start with a conclusion and will contort or discard any facts that threaten said conclusion.
Yah... It's not as if the healthcare/pharma industry have ever ran false multi-year propaganda campaigns that later turned out to be outright harmful to people.
They'd never lie and conspire for years and years. That couldn't possibly happen.
I would point out that the anti-vaxx campaign about vaccines causing autism is a multi-decade propaganda campaign that absolutely harms people.
However, being as that is merely a to quoque fallacy, I'm rather curious: do you have any examples of said campaigns run by the healthcare/pharma industry? And, more importantly, do you have any evidence such campaigns have anything to do with vaccines?
Note: the Purdue/Sackler campaign surrounding opiods is already well-known, but AFAICT, it has no relationship with vaccines.
Purdue is one pharmaceutical company. Given their behavior, I find no fault with anyone who'd distrust products from Purdue specifically. However, it appears Purdue doesn't produce any vaccines, so it is orthogonal to the discussion.
> You think the opioid campaign is the only real wrongdoing by pharmaceutical companies??
I'm open to the possibility of there being additional wrongdoing by Purdue or other pharmaceutical companies, perhaps even related to vaccines. However, the fact that one pharmaceutical company engaged in (admittedly pretty egregious) wrongdoing with respect to opioids does not itself prove any wrongdoing regarding vaccines made by itself or other companies. Assuming otherwise is falling victim to a syllogistic fallacy.
Answering my call for evidence of wrongdoing specific to vaccines with such a conspiratorial-minded question suggests you have no such evidence. I implore you to prove me incorrect.
I'm talking about perceived industry wide reputational damage by the public as a cause for distrust.
Who cares about fallacies?
Beliefs triumph over logic. Public perception > truth.
Further reputational damages are not unwarranted. Thalidomide is an old example. There are many more recent ones outside of opioid. You're free to look up actual court cases.
> Do companies run by Elon Musk violate ethical and environmental regulations much more often than other similar companies
This strikes me as a completely wrong-headed take on it. It's not OK for one company to do this merely because others do the same or worse. I'd much prefer no companies violate ethical and environmental regulations.
I applaud the exposé not because of Elon's political leanings or even because he's involved with the company at all, but because I hope it's at least a little push towards the company behaving better. Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés (and I think we all there are), I look forward to reading them if/when Politico or some other journalist outlet publishes them, regardless of the political affiliations in the offending companies' leadership.
I don't quite understand this mentality that it's not OK to investigate or otherwise bring justice to organizations considered right-leaning until it's been exhaustively proven no organization on the left is at least as bad.
If you don't want right-leaning companies being the first in the crosshairs, maybe join the team and convince them from the inside that flagrantly violating the law in front of the very inspectors sent to verify legal compliance only to resume doing it the moment they believe said inspectors left but without verifying it is really stupid.
If you have a large number of corporations breaking the law, you have to start your investigations somewhere, and the company with the giant neon sign saying "we're breaking the law!" is as good a spot to start as any.
I made a mistake if my post made it seem like I thought this article should not be written or published. And especially if it seemed like my concern was that I thought Boring Company was being unfairly targeted because of Elon's repellent politics.
I'm concerned that this article was published because Elon Musk is a celebrity, not because the offence itself is newsworthy. And if I thought that this article would effect corporate practices anyway, I would simply shut my mouth, and keep my apprehensions to myself. But I suspect that Elon will get a little dopamine hit if he sees his name in a news headline, and every other CEO of a major corporation will ignore it altogether and continue committing environmental offences whenever they think it is advantageous.
I think that Elon Musk is a bad person, I think that billionaires shouldn't exist, and specifically that the kinds of people who become billionaires are some of the worst kinds of people to wield power in society. But I don't think that Elon Musk is special. I don't think that he's a uniquely bad person, I think he is basically a very normal CEO.
> Should there be other companies requiring similar exposés
I think that there are so many other such cases that it is almost impossible to wrap my head around. I said "I wish I had a sense of the numbers" not because I want to normalize and excuse this, but because I think the scope of the problem is so much bigger than this story suggests. Here[1] is a tiny slice of what I mean, a review of environmental penalties issued in Ontario, Canada. It seems like there should be 15 to 20 such exposes in the Local News section of The Toronto Star every year.
Elon Musk, like every other antisocial monster leading a major corporation is "just" making a calculated decision comparing the risk of getting caught and the cost of a fine against the expense of doing the right thing.
I think the real story is that maybe fines are insufficient to address the issue of corporate environmental offenses, or that maybe they accurately represent the priorities of regulators, but not of citizens.
There's a problem here and it's not that Elon Musk is evil. Our society needs to be resilient to the existence of evil people.
Or, they live in one of the 40-something states where the election margins are large enough that it doesn't matter whether they vote.
My state hasn't voted Democrat since 1964. The only two elections with less than a 10-point spread since then were in 1976 (7.5% spread) and 1992 (5% spread due to Perot stealing votes from Bush Sr.).
By what mechanism do you think that refusing to vote will improve your favored diminutive party's odds in your state?
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2. Or maybe it's about cost, instead?
What does it cost to vote in your state? How much time, and how much money, does a voter need to put forth in order to cast a vote in [wherever you are]?
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3. Are you a masochist? (Are you sure about that?)
But several of our most popular languages don't (e.g., Javascript, Python), with Javascript having particularly ugly behavior.
> standard data formats
We're moving from more formalized data formats (XML) to far lesser formalized data formats (JSON). For example, the former gives relatively powerful tools (through XSD) to define types and what constitutes valid values, while the latter doesn't even have a standard date format. Perhaps JSON schema will one day invalidate most of this concern, but it's still pretty young and not widely utilized AFAICT.
Reminder: while the Democrats are trying to signal they have some power to resist, the truth is that the Republican party can end the filibuster rule today and pass whatever budget bill they like without requiring a single Democrat vote.
They had no problem carving out an exception to the filibuster rule when pushing through district court judges and later Supreme Court justices without Democrat support, so they can't even argue that they consider the filibuster sacrosanct: they don't.
This government shutdown is exclusively a problem of Republican making.
> They had no problem carving out an exception to the filibuster rule when pushing through district court judges and later Supreme Court justices without Democrat support
Democrats removed the filibuster on district and appellate court judges.
Why do you consider this a rational concern/precaution? What evidence lead you to believe the vaccination schedule, which is generally-accepted in the medical community, should be spread out?
I can give you a reason it's likely not rational: babies are protected by their mother's immunity for approximately 6 months after birth. The current vaccination schedule[1] is largely built with this in mind. Delaying vaccines for no other reason than "it's too many too fast" concerns does nothing but increase the chance your child ultimately gets infected with one of the pathogens vaccinated against.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-schedules/child-easyread.ht...