See also:

Pseudoscience
Quackery

Beyond this being hokum in the vein of snake oil, are you affiliated with the company putting these videos up?

And then on top of all this we now seem to have more and more populist snake oil nonsense like 'solar roadways', actually starting to siphon government funding away from real projects.

Good article BTW, thank you.

If only I agreed with you....but sadly these things are NOT off the table, clearly. In fact, it's the minority rights being infringed upon that may have determined this election, so to say they are settled is simply wrong.
They SHOULD be settled, and among educated people they are, but the state of education in this country is pretty sad, as you can see from the results of this election. Trump won among the uneducated, and they are the majority.

What should terrify people is a statement he made last week, that" won't it be great when we are one nation, under ONE god", implying he plans on somehow making us monotheistic as a nation.

The electoral college is set up for EXACTLY this eventuality....that a smarmy snake oil salesman might dupe the uneducated masses into electing someone dangerous, so we are supposed to have a firewall of educated thinkers that, no matter what the vote, can elect any candidate they wish. Unfortunately, they have never done that, and now seem to have forgotten that elections like this are the sole reason we have an electoral college, not a direct democracy.

I wonder what happens when Trump gives his deposition about raping the 13 year old girl in the early 90's in December....if he admits to raping her, or is found to be guilty of it, does he still get sworn in, or do we have President Pierce? Can someone please accuse him of multiple felonies and get him convicted quickly? That seems to be our only hope, and President Pierce doesn't sound much better...only slightly more sane.

What on earth makes you say that? Before running as a "conservative", he was pro abortion and supported progressive/liberal plans.
He's incredibly non religious, he reads Hitler's writings more than the bible by far (by his own admission, btw).
The scriptures warn you against this kind of person, but in your desperation, you ignore your faith in favor of placation from a consummate snake oil salesman....one that wrote a book on how to get what you want by lying.
Any Christian supporting that divisive serial philanderer, constant liar, and probable child rapist is proving a lack of faith in their stated beliefs by putting bigotry and disdain above all, including the lessons of their religion.
I think Jesus (were he real) would slap the white off of you before turning his back for supporting the antithesis of his teachings, no matter what mental gymnastics you've done to convince yourself it's ok.

It's not IN a vacuum. the pressure is just very low, like a high-altitude jet airliner. The skis the pod runs on aren't even electromagnetic, they use micro jets of compressed air, like an air-hockey table.

As for Thunderfoot, I get he likes debunking things like those retarded snake-oil "smart pavement" people. However, saying Musk is one of them is ignoring what Elon's already accomplished. I can GUARANTEE Elon Musk has dumped more money than Thunderfoot will make in his lifetime in engineers and pure scientists just to see if it was FEASIBLE, let alone possible.

Listening to Trump is like listening to a kid give a pretend speech.

"We need to get the bad people what did this and all the muslims must cooperate with the police to get the bad men because they know, they know who the bad people are and they have to tell us."

It's like watching a confidence trickster sell snake oil - "It works, I know.. I know, trust me." - and I'm one of the only people that can see through it. Inside there's a desperate man with a hunted look on his face going "Please tell me they bought what I just said and they're not going to pour all my oil down the drain and make me walk out of town with my pants around my ankles again."

He's like a white, old Kanye West - he's all talk and no substance, his best stuff happened so long ago no one can remember whether it was really any good in the first place or just good fortune and all his co-workers think he's a joke and can't believe how he ever got to where he's gotten. Whilst Kanye married into an association with a big arse, Trump achieved that all by himself though he did have a head start with that name.

Can you please stop posting your bullshit woo and misinformation?

While marijuana might help with ALS, there are still no proper studies with anything conclusive on the subject.

As for the rest....Eric is not "winning", he's a scam artist out to sell products to desperate people. The worst kind of snake oil salesman.

Finished off with a nice dose of anecdotal bullshit.

John Oliver is wrong.

Yes, some supplements (say, the milk thistle found in Rockstar Energy Drink) are just snake oil. But other supplements have clinical effects, such as St. John's Wort (http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/st-johns-wort) for minor depression and, arguably, glucosamine and chondroitin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_on_glucosamine_and_chondroitin)

Here's the thing though - if the FDA regulates supplements in the same way they do drugs, the price of supplements would go through the roof. It costs 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS to get a new drug approved by the FDA. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/01/24/shocking-secrets-of-fda-clinical-trials-revealed/)

So the supplements market provides a very useful alternative, something that John Oliver simply doesn't understand. You can either pay ten bucks for a 300 pack of St. John's Wort, or you can pay ten times that amount for the FDA approved antidepressant, Zoloft.

The sad truth is that the FDA really does overregulate the drug market, which is one of the major reasons health care is so fucking expensive in this country. John Oliver lives in magical fairly land where regulating supplements would come with no cost, but in reality regulating it would just close down the only inexpensive drug system we have in the world.

Scientific studies do exist for supplements (I read through the studies while my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School taking their mandatory alt med class), and if you do your research, you can distinguish the snake oil from the supplements that have real effects.

Fixed that for you. And @shatterdrose, people love their snake oil.

So, yet again, the problem can be traced back to the insidious influence of lobbying. If only there was some way to prevent it...

Snake oil is the best kind for stir frying. It has the highest smoke point

Nah. Not snake oil. It's just a fruit juice. You're thinking of those "Extenz" schlong-enlarging pills.

Excellent bit of marketing.

It's still snake oil though.

Not that I come here much for the discussion these days, but describing all economists as charlatan snake oil salesmen, followed by describing Friedman is an 'insufferable cunt', does not exactly fan the flames of reasoned debate.

@RedSky
that is not entirely accurate to state that it was friedmans economic policies that gave rise to chile.

i will agree to an extant that the original groundwork could be attributed to friedman and his economic plans but those plans were not all sunshine and rainbows.it was the chilean government who began to enact and implement solid policies to turn that state around after pinochet.dismantling much of what friedman had started.i.e: private pensions,schools,water etc etc.

and @Yogi does have a point.friedman is quoted often as saying that in times of crisis,it is a perfect opportunity to exploit that crisis in order to implement a policy that otherwise would have been rejected.

now we can argue just how responsible friedmen is in regards to a government who uses/abuses this tactic,but it does not change that fact that friedman was the author of "shock doctrine".

just as in this video,and one of those rare times i agree with friedman.the information should be public and governments only role in business should be that of "fraud police".it comes down to who is responsible.

which brings me to my final point.
economists are the charlatan snake oil salesmen.they consistently get it wrong,almost always.

economies are creations by and for people.
the human element seems to confound these intellectuals.
what plays out brilliantly on paper almost never does in real life..or at least for any protracted period of time.

which is also why i find friedman to be an insufferable cunt.
if there ever was a spark of humanity in that man,i have yet to see it.

@Sniper007, you don't realise how right you are.

It's exactly like the DeBeers video. The "alternative medicine" people have cunningly marketed a bunch of unscientific nonsense as "common sense", and yes, they'll die from it.

Unfortunately, this won't be evolutionarily selected out. First, most (not all) people develop cancer later in life, when they've already had children. Second, choice of medicine is not a genetic trait.

@enoch, I do not believe that sniper is trying to sell snake oil, merely that he's been taken in by it.

As for the disparity between research on causes vs treatment, well, it's somewhat understandable, especially in a market driven environment. Cynical as it sounds, you can pretty much charge whatever you like to dying people and they'll pay it. Convincing people to change their lifestyle is a much harder sell.

And absolutely, people eat way too much processed crap today. No-one is disputing that, neither am I disputing that a bad diet can be the cause of cancer.

We may one day look back at chemo as the 20th century equivalent of bloodletting. I truly hope so. But right now, it's still the best we have.