MRSA is Methicillin resistant, MDRSA is Multiple Drug Resistant, for clarification.  And I hoped the thread title would be enough for the laymen.

You gonna be home tonight?  I could drop it off or put it in your mail if you ain't there.

Well let's just hope that doctors don't start throwing this shit around like candy and make it useless like they did with tet.

...I was going to say, hopefully this stuff won't be another just another example of how the beautification industry is desperately trying to kill everybody.

If I have one goal in life right now, it's to prove to atheists that capitalism is an effect, not a cause.

Can, or will?

Sure, there are effects that can replace it.  We've seen bunches of them.  However, as to whether or not capitalism will ever be replaced, I'm highly skeptical.

Before I go on, I need to be clear with some terms because I use them in a more sociobiological sense than most political junkies.  When I refer to capitalism, I mean any system of societal organization in which things of value are traded at values determined primarily by the dynamics of supply and demand.  This can include barter, and believe it or not, it can include communism.

When we look at the history of civilization, we might be shocked to realize what tiny blips on the radar were communism and other utopianisms.  That's because they don't take our DNA into account.  Once we understand game theory, we realize that at some level or another, any utopian ideal will fail utterly because of the dynamics of stable evolutionary states.  That is, if everybody's a hawk, a dove benefits, and vice versa.

Contrary to many political beliefs, human societies do not progress in and of themselves.  The reason the !Kung do not have an advanced socialized state is that the constraints of their population and environment dictate their social organization -- not, as some believe, an agreement between all the governed to institute a particular system.  The reason America is capitalist is not because of moral failings on the part of the founding fathers, or lack of knowledge of international commerce.  It's because capitalism was what emerged from the combination of environment, population density, and availability of resources.

Those are the three things that have the most effect on government -- environment, population density, and resources.  In a country where there is far more than enough to go around, communism will never emerge.  It's simply too obvious that there's no need to ration everyone down to a particular level, and there's no desire by the populace to simply dole out equal portions to everybody when even personal failure doesn't result in abject poverty.

In short, so long as resources are abundant, it is highly unlikely that anything will replace the basic model of supply and demand dictating value.  This will ensure that some form of capitalism will be the primary system for a long time to come (assuming stability of resources globally).  That's not to say that American style capitalism will be the norm.  Clearly, our system is pretty harmful in a lot of ways, but make no mistake, even the most socialist of the Western European nations still operate largely on the broad principles of capitalism -- individuals competing in a basically free environment.

One of the reasons I try so hard to un-villify the notion of capitalism is just that -- it doesn't have to be unrestricted free market to be capitalism.  The point is that the principle of free trade is driven by human nature.  Where we can direct it, making society more efficient, this is clearly a good thing.  But to try to counteract it entirely is foolhardy.

I think this is easy enough to illustrate, Hamby. Industrialized civilization absolutely requires the following processes:

* Exploration for raw materials

* Extraction of raw materials

* Refinement of raw materials

* Manufacturing of goods from refined raw materials

* Distribution of manufactured goods to the market

* Transaction of manufactured goods from the market to consumers, factoring-in the work required to create the product (based on the afore-mentioned processes) and demand for the product

...So, we have to get someone or something to do the work required by each of these steps (and people can go ahead and more if they feel there are other crucial steps I'm missing; these are the ones that sprung to my mind) in order for us to live as leisure-rich shoppers rather than desperate hunter-gatherers. Civilizations in antiquity answered the problem of work through slavery - Greeks, as an example, were free to pursue lives of luxury and relaxation as the 'barbarians' of the world did most of their work for them under the lash.

Modern civilization has answered the problem through the almighty buck. People do things that they would otherwise never opt to do so that they can have money to purchase the goods and services that this system creates. Whatever permutation you want to point to, this will b the basis of any successful system. It makes sense, then, as to why capitalism would've proved the most competitive and successful of these systems - it entices people (through positive reinforcement. See: wage increase) to do more of this necessary work, which makes more goods of better quality available, which people then want to buy so they will do yet more work, etc. It also allows for degrees of cheating, because you aren't actually being rewarded directly with the goods - you're awarded with an abstract currency instead. So, if you can figure-out a way to get lots of currency while doing little to no work, you've really hit the jackpot. A system that includes rules that can be bent around like this is always going to be more popular than one that doesn't, because a percentage of a population is always going to want an opportunity to cheat.

I've talked in pipe-dream terms with friends about an alternate system that allows people to have completely free access to whatever goods they want on the market (abolishing the currency concept entirely) and entices them to work by putting a 'boasting' system into place (I'm put on a team, whatever we accomplish we get to broadcast to the community, people who accomplish nothing or very little also have this fact broadcast to the community), but as Hamby has said repeatedly, ideas of this sort are far-fetched at best. Controlling interests, whether we care to admit it, are also an emergent effect of general animal behavior, and people are likely to reject any concept that doesn't offer a chance to elevate onesself to an elite class of some kind.

Much as there is room for some socialism in a capitalist society, there is room for some capitalism inside a socialist one.

We did do a pretty big hijack there, didn't we?  For what it's worth, I've said my peace.  And yeah, I think the science stuff is cooler, too.

I hate politics.

Typically speaking, putting your money on the bugs is always a good idea.  When you have ten thousand or more generations to one, math is on your side.

And there's the human generation length and population size, too.  It's not too big a deal to give bugs a chance to forget their resistance in, say, Milwaukee.  You just have to get a couple hundred doctors to stop prescribing it for a while and build electric fences around the town so residents cant go to Chicago to get a second opinion.

When somebody's got a nasty bug that they haven't been able to shake for three weeks, and they're about to lose their job from missed days, it's kind of hard to convince them that they ought to run with it because of their grandchildren.  Most people will say, "Awww... it's just me. I'm not going to hurt anything.  It's just this one bout of the flu I can't shake.  I'm good about not taking antibiotics most of the time."  The length of time involved gives people a feeling of immunity from guilt.  After all, those kids won't be born for another thirty years.

While we're at it, let's remember that China and India have a lot of airports, and people come and go to just about everywhere, bringing bugs with them.

It's just my gut feeling, but I'm guessing  though weeding out antibiotic resistance is theoretically pretty easy, it's damn near impossible on a large scale in practice.