Those two ruin more lives because they're legal and way more widely available, so more people abuse them - not because they're worse. Larger sample size means larger number affected overall. And yet we have people here arguing that hard drugs should be legal and widely available too.
Let's be honest, food (sugar) and alcohol are in a totally different league from hard drugs. They're not even relevant to the discussion here. We can do an experiment. I'll take 2 shots of alcohol every day, my friend will drink 3 sodas a day (100+g of sugar), and you can shoot up heroin every day. Let's see how we're all doing in a year.
Will you be giving me a 100% pure, regulated, pharmaceutical grade dose of heroin at the price it takes to produce it in a legal market? Or will I be using an adulterated mystery packet of unknown substance and purity off the street that is orders of magnitude more expensive due to the profits generated for barbaric criminal enterprises along the supply chain?
It doesn't directly contradict the paper you linked, but figured it's worth mentioning - the hypothesis about a diabetes-Alzheimer's link might have originally stemmed from fraudulent work. From the "related story" at the bottom of the linked Science article about fraud https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio... (related story is titled "Research backing experimental Alzheimer’s drug was first target of suspicion", also available in their reader here:
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.ade0181?ado...)
> The most influential Cassava-related paper appeared in The Journal of Clinical Investigation in 2012. The authors—including Wang; Arnold; David Bennett, who leads a brain-tissue bank at Rush University; and his Rush colleague, neuroscientist Zoe Arvanitakis—linked insulin resistance to Alzheimer’s and the formation of amyloid plaques. Cassava scientists say Simufilam lessens insulin resistance. They relied on a method in which dead brain tissue, frozen for a decade and then partially thawed and chopped, purportedly generates chemical signals.
> Schrag and others say it contradicts basic neurobiology. Schrag adds that he could find no evidence that other investigators have replicated that result. (None of the authors agreed to be interviewed for this article.)
> That paper supported the science behind Simufilam, Schrag says, “and spawned an entire field of research in Alzheimer’s, ‘diabetes of the brain.’” It has been cited more than 1500 times. Schrag sent the journal’s editor his analysis of more than 15 suspect images in two groups. The editor says the journal analyzed high-resolution versions of the images in the first group. It could not corroborate his findings and therefore did not investigate further.
>if autonomous driving can save 1+ life, it's better than what we have now so we should keep it and accept that crashes will occur
This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident. Crashes are all about fault, and as a safe driver you can avoid most at-fault accidents. You get to avoid all the self-inflicted damage of drunk/incapacitated driving, unsafe driving for weather conditions, extreme speeding / reckless driving, etc. You still have to deal with the externalities of those, but some fraction of the time you can notice and anticipate these people on the road and stay away. Not always of course, so that still leaves some number of deaths per mile, but I'd bet that threshold is way lower than the "save one life" bar. So if you're a good driver, autonomous cars at the "current death rate" safety bar would make you less safe.
What you get by ignoring this and using the current death rate as a bar is a "transfer of deaths": you take all the deaths that were the fault of the driver (driver dies due to being drunk/high, very reckless driving, etc) and transfer them to random innocent people who were not at fault.
> This argument ignores the reality of driving: by being a competent, attentive, careful driver you can avoid many classes of accident.
It’s funny you use the word reality since this is completely at odds with driving in America. You’re comparing an idealized world of competent drivers to the real world where there are basically no barriers to getting a license and everyone is on their phone behind the wheel. Unless you advocate for stricter licensing and more police enforcement against inattentive driving with equal vigor, this line of reasoning doesn’t hold.
Here's a nice article answering your question and explaining the confusion here. It definitely seems like people who want to believe that covid is a hoax are taking this CDC post (which is technical and directed at scientists in testing labs) out of context and misinterpreting it to back up their narrative.
In explaining the CDC’s decision to end the use of its own PCR test at the end of 2021, Kristen Nordlund, an agency spokeswoman, in an email to us cited “the availability of commercial options for clinical diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection, including multiplexed (discussed here) and high-throughput options” — referring to technologies that use an automated process to administer hundreds of tests per day.
“Although the CDC 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019 nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel met an important unmet need when it was developed and deployed and has not demonstrated any performance issues, the demand for this test has declined with the emergence of other higher-throughput and multiplexed assays,” Nordlund said.
She continued: “CDC is encouraging public health laboratories (PHL) to adopt the CDC Influenza SARS-CoV-2 (Flu SC2) Multiplex Assay to enable continued surveillance for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2, which will save both time and resources for PHL.”
Interesting - I've only worked on pretty small eng teams, but I couldn't live without git blame (or an editor/IDE feature using git blame). It's like another dimension, seeing the history of code line-by-line and learning why it was added, especially if those lines are months or years old. With clean linear commit history and clear commit messages you can easily see not just what was changed, but why it was changed, along with other commentary from the author and often a test plan.
That's not how evolution works. The question to ask is, if most food sources except for grass disappeared, would humanity as a whole (through mass starvation and the resulting natural selection) adapt to be able to survive on grass within the next 95000 years? And the answer isn't necessarily yes; humans might also just go extinct.
Let's be honest, food (sugar) and alcohol are in a totally different league from hard drugs. They're not even relevant to the discussion here. We can do an experiment. I'll take 2 shots of alcohol every day, my friend will drink 3 sodas a day (100+g of sugar), and you can shoot up heroin every day. Let's see how we're all doing in a year.