schoper

I correctly described the situation. I think it's ugly too. Do you have a fix? Because that's what we need, a fix, not cheap moralizing.

Moralizing doesn't save anyone from gangrene and sepsis and a slow death. It doesn't prevent the diarrhea to dehydration to death sequence. It doesn't do an ounce of good for anyone.

Immunocompromise (poor, sick, elderly, AIDS, etc.) + long-term antibiotic use = Antibiotic resistance.

That equation is death, and we need fixes, not the crap in your comment above.

"Also, I don't know how your society is or does, but in our country the poor have a better immune system."

No doubt you live on Mars or Venus.

Antibiotic resistance shows up among the unhealthiest communities first. They act as the necessary incubators that resistance needs to develop. In a person with a working immune system, the time frame of antibiotic and pathogen contact is very small compared to the time frame of antibiotic and pathogen contact in an immunocompromised patient.

To put the above into simple English: Our problem isn't that we give antibiotics out like candy, it's that we give them to the elderly, people with AIDS, the poor, etc. This massively increases the chance of antibiotic resistance developing.

What can we do about it? To start with, run the numbers, make some cost-benefit calculations, and think about the problem. There may be technical as well as social solutions.

Not thinking about the problem, making it harder for the healthiest people to get antibiotics, and pretending that you are doing something is also a viable option. It's what we're doing now.

Except for deaf children, who seem to fall along the same IQ distribution as hearing children. And rich children seem to inherit their parents IQs instead of their Guatemalan nannies' IQs.

But feel free to go on believing that genes don't do anything. God just must have created everyone equal.

No worries, the government subsidizes the living arrangements of the lower classes so that they can continue to live and breed in pathological concentrations in expensive cities. The supply of people to mug/rape you is still higher than out in the suburbs.

It's not a moral calculus, Dan.

No it doesn't. I've been poor. There is no 1 standard deviation IQ penalty.

"The finding further undercuts the theory that poor people, through inherent weakness, are responsible for their own poverty..."

Again, no. The poorer members of our society have more limitations on average. This is usually IQ, but will often be something like physical disability (ie., blindness), ugliness, or poor socialization, inherent or learned. This does not mean that it is all right to construct a society without full employment or universal healthcare. But if people trying to help the poor continue to be taken in by the above belief, they are never going to get anywhere.

Please delete your above comment. It's derogatory and wrong. In fact, I believe the following:

There are a great many intelligent black people. Christians in America's underclass are just as likely to cohabit without marriage as non-Christians. If gay people, as a class, are really excited about taking up the burdens of marriage, I have no objection. They can't change their sexual preference, after all.

That is certainly a possibility. Unless that customer comes from a state with privately run DMVs, and is used to a 5 minute wait without scheduling. Further, it may be that that customer has been greatly impressed by the efficiency and wealth of California's private industry compared to his old state, and was not entirely prepared for the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of California's government.

Jessed, I can tell that you love your government. I'm going to suggest something that you can listen to or not, as you choose: Part of loving your government means examining critiques and saying "how can this be improved?" rather than wearing your heart on your sleeve about it.

Oh, but I tell all my friends and family: "Get a government job!"

I use the DMV in Redwood City, CA, and efficiency is not my experience there. They have the worker pool model as well. The last time I was there, I was unfortunate to be in the pool with the worker who could barely type. He processed 2-3 customers in an hour, while the Asian gentleman who replaced him at lunch processed 5 times as many. The first gentleman, I assume, is fit for his current position or McDonalds.

I have used stunningly efficient DMVs. They do exist. But the existence of DMVs that do not scrape the bottom of the barrel for hiring, and are more efficient because of it, is proof of my point, if you take a moment to think about it.

JamisonM, please travel to your local DMV, and while you spend most of your day waiting in the line, repeat to yourself: "My government is behemoth, and therefore large enough to both hire intelligent people for important roles, and also provide sinecures for talentless individuals from groups with political clout for non-vital roles."

Smart white guy gets locked up, manages to make something of himself once his hormones cool off over the course of a few years. This is not rare. Nor is it something you can apply to the general prison population. I.e., think of what the racial makeup of prison would look like 5 years after you started giving smarter people lesser sentences due to their lower rates of recidivism (and vice-versa).

The average prison inmate has an IQ of 85. What can you do with that? That is McDonalds or a government-job level human potential. Further, large swaths of criminals come from parts of our society that don't avail themselves of a traditional means of attaining social restraint: marriage. While everyone here on HN has been solving such important world problems as gay marriage, America's underclass has more or less stopped marrying. Bizarrely, the libertine paradise has not ensued.

If you have a work environment that only kills the marginal...then you have a work environment that kills the marginal. You need to start thinking about physical requirements and medical examinations before hiring, much like the military. Or maybe you need to think about putting a stop to a system that is really about hazing instead of getting stuff done.

The second might improve other things about the efficiency of your business as well. That will have economic consequences not just to you and your employees, and is therefore a thing of proper public scrutiny.

Whether or not you are convinced is your business. It took me years of hard living to learn from my mistakes. If you can learn the same lessons some easier way, or if you need to take a harder route, it's all one to me.