have you had actually negative interactions like that? they sting for years, even after hundreds of mild-to-positive ones. the brain focuses on risk-minimization and not reward-maximization.
My brain on a Monday in a crap mood driving on the highway: that jerk that just cut me off has ruined my entire day.
My brain on Friday after good sleep and a relaxing morning: heh look at the guy, he's definitely in a hurry. Hope he gets where he's going, back to my jams!
I try to train myself to remember to be Friday brain, but sometimes Monday brain comes out and I'm in a funk that makes me forget I actually have a choice about NOT reacting a specific way. I like to think I'm getting better at consistently not sweating the small stuff and just letting those instances go without giving them an appreciable amount of mental space better suited to relaxing and listening to good music.
you posted an opinion piece by "Director of National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office (NMIO) and Commander, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)" (i.e. State Department mouthpiece) and the other source is from 2022, with airport still operating, (no evidence that it belongs to china), directly refuting your own point.
> America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level
Chinese have actually been investing into infrastructure and helping build Africa out. What are you smoking? Do you need a reminder who ran Transatlantic Slave Trade and what IMF represents? There are no good guys in the lending world. Are you assigning a moral value to loans and repayments now? If someone gives you money they expect interest. Doesn't matter if they're Chinese or American.
P.S. judging from your other comments, you're European, not American, and so at this point of Trump presidency (and listening to Carney's speech), you should realize that "The West" isn't about moral hegemony. This isn't America good, China bad. It's a calculus of power. Trump just laid that bare by showing that might makes right, which is why he's renegotiating our already dominant position, and showing how this hegemony and loan structure was built. The liberal veneer was there as a pretty varnish. The fact that you're still out here pretending like we're the good guys is strange to me, unless you're one of those NAFO guys that are kind of going extinct because US is screwing itself over by hurting its allies.
It's good economic policy based on what? Did you run a counterfactual already? Comparing the US to other countries is meaningless, it's not the same set of init conditions and variables.
Do you realize that those taxes go to fund public services and help people stay afloat, which I don't need a study to show you, creates far more customers for all these tax evaders in the first place? Go back 50 years to see what this country used to be and how much shit it got done and compare it to today. There are measures of productivity engineered in math, and then there is common sense: majority of existing infrastructure was built decades ago and now it costs billions in overrun projects to build a single station in NYC.
The current system works just fine in terms of punishingly taxing everyone on this website and the poor, that's why it feels like I'm contributing half of my salary to the federal government. What it doesn't do is take its share from extremely wealthy, who in turn DO NOT SERVE the economy because they're effectively stateless agents, who can put their money into Seychelles or whatever. Nobody would bat an eye if those billionaires would contribute the billions to the economy. Instead you get people crying about how "the government is inefficient, it gets nothing done, I'd rather the titan spend it as they see fit." But if this ship called United States floods they will be the first to abandon it, just like a famous critter.
I'm sorry but posts like this are the exact definition of bootlicking.
I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.
And/or something like Amazon Prime Video and how it aggregates its main subscription, ad-driven licensing, VOD and, that's what I'm getting at, hosted third party subscriptions into one UI.
I actually hate that in Prime, because discovery for shows and movies is never a positive experience but a setup chore separate from consumption, and advertising stuff that isn't already paid for always makes it worse. But for music I think it could actually be enjoyable, because you can consume and browse at the same time is actually a thing. Like diving into discogs.com while listening. I could easily see myself listening to some artist's main albums as part of some standard subscription (that pays as badly as spotify?) and then shell out a single digit payment on one hundred pay-per-listen tokens for obscure B-sides from the label that the artist is signed on, or something like that. Or reimplenent radio, by offering a licensing model where what would have been single releases in the olden days are part of the ad based subscription, but album content is only available through purchase or (various?) subscriptions.
Make it a marketplace of monetization models! Perhaps the right company to try this would be someone completely unexpected like cloudflare? Being a blank slate from both consumer and licensor perspective could almost be considered a prerequisite for a project like that...
> In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash.
There are donation buttons for some artist on Spotify. I guess the artist need to enable it? ("Signum Regis" is an artist that has a Donate button for example)
Do you mean, how do you handle $0.001 monthly payouts? Spotify could set a payout threshold. If the threshold is not passed in a given month, the balance carries over to the next month.
that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth.
Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.
I'm honestly of the opinion that all of the ethical questions that arose during this search are fairly minuscule compared to the potential findings that could help us end this never-ending outbreak altogether. (At least by developing better targets for drugs like Paxlovid, if their hypothesis about GI tract replication turns out to be correct.)
Of them all the potential to reveal that the patient X is hiding their HIV status is probably the biggest tragedy that can happen, since it will compromise their social and work standing due to stigma.
If, however, this person does NOT know they have HIV or something similarly immunocompromising, it's in fact their moral prerogative to find this person and inform them of their disease, instead of beating around the bush trying to go easy on their feelings instead of potentially saving their life.
Either way, at some point it becomes a question of common-good vs individual good and these options aren't so bad to even have this debate.
There is nothing that can help us "end" the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak. A highly infectious respiratory virus with multiple animal reservoirs can't be eradicated or even really contained. At this point it's just one more of several endemic human coronaviruses and will always be around in some variants, much like HCoV-OC43.
I think you misread what I said. I said "could help us" which just implies it's a distant possibility. I am aware that it's an extremely low probability event, but not an impossible one, for example in 200 years they might find a universal beta coronavirus vaccine based on a general stem and not on a variant specific spike.
More information in this case is better outcomes regardless. We can't just accept the current state of affairs and do nothing if there are still avenues of improvement that don't involve pretending like COVID is a mild disease or forcing quarantines whenever some worse variants shows up.
Whether it will jump back from deer or dogs (two animals aside from minks who i remember testing positive for sars-cov-2) back to humans is a huge if (hasn't happened so far as far as I remember, or if it did, it couldn't have been more than ballpark ~5 cases), but I don't disagree that it might happen once more, since I'm not a lab leak guy.
> There is nothing that can help us "end" the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) outbreak.
We could massively mitigate its effects to the point we could actually live with the virus without risking the often debilitating effects it can have.
On a societal/systemic level: HEPA air filters in hospitals, care homes, public transport, schools, churches, generally any indoors place where large amounts of people gather would not just drastically cut down on transmission of pathogens of all kind, but also make the lives of people suffering from allergies so much easier. We put a lot of care into regulating our food, water, even our clothing to be free of pathogens and contaminants - but the air we breathe daily is barely regulated at all!
On an individual level, we could wash our goddamn hands more often (I'd be really interested in, but probably also really disgusted by a study on soap and towel consumption in large office buildings before, during and after the pandemic), wear masks in public transport, and stay the fuck home when sick - although I realize that this is all but impossible in the US with there not being a federal law that allows people to stay home when sick with anything without risking of getting fired. Here in Germany, it's no big deal.
Instead, our politicians seem to have completely given up any idea of dealing with covid.
It seems clear at this point that Covid (the latest variants in the wild, at any rate) does not cause "often debilitating effects", and so any mitigation must have its costs, which are very high for any easily-transmissible respiratory illness, weighed against its benefits, which are pretty low.
Remember: "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs." Otherwise, we should just plug everyone into VR pods a la The Matrix and be done with disease once and for all.
> It seems clear at this point that Covid (the latest variants in the wild, at any rate) does not cause "often debilitating effects"
Depending on the study, you have up to 45% of people experiencing covid symptoms (aka Long Covid) almost four months past infection, and around 10% that experience symptoms 18 months past infection [1].
The amount of people so massively impacted by Long Covid that they can't work any more or have to significantly reduce their labor hours is so large that it's been theorized to be a significant contributor to current labor shortages [2]. So yes, it does classify as "often" IMHO.
> and so any mitigation must have its costs, which are very high for any easily-transmissible respiratory illness, weighed against its benefits, which are pretty low.
Just the 2023/24 covid+rsv+influenza wave is suspected to have cost the German economy alone 36 billion euros in lost income and sick day payments [3].
We need pathogen mitigation concepts, the sooner the better.
> COVID-19 is associated with clinically significant symptoms despite resolution of the acute infection (i.e., post-COVID-19 syndrome). Fatigue and cognitive impairment are amongst the most common and debilitating symptoms of post-COVID-19 syndrome.
Your comment doesn’t make any sense because how would the absence of an infection ever arrive at a debilitating outcome and thus be a point of comparison? The parent claimed COVID doesn’t cause debilitating outcomes. I provided evidence it does, including specific use of the exact term by medical researchers. When they couldn’t refute that, they made an ambiguous appeal to other infections to distract from being wrong, trying to shift attention from their original, unsupported claim to a new claim (COVID is the same as other viruses), and demanding that I provide evidence contrary to that. But that’s separate from the truth or falsity of the original claim, and thus irrelevant.
> Your comment doesn’t make any sense because how would the absence of an infection ever arrive at a debilitating outcome and thus be a point of comparison?
Base rate in the population in general, which would be a mix of various infections and not. For the no-infection part: those particular ones, for example, could be caused by aging.
> When they couldn’t refute that, they made an ambiguous appeal to other infections to distract from being wrong
This is controlled for by the NOS ranking of the studies in the meta analysis, but since you didn’t actually read it and are arguing from your priors, I guess you wouldn’t have observed that.
Of course it's not. "Flu causes exactly the same symptoms" is a radically different scenario than "flu doesn't cause any of these symptoms", which is different again than "Covid causes 20% more symptoms than flu". As far as i know, it's mostly likely that last one(?) But I'm not really sure, which is why I asked.
Regardless, it's important to put these figures in context.
This context is irrelevant to the truth or falsity of whether COVID often results in debilitating outcomes (the original claim), which I provided evidence it does and you have provided nothing to refute. Many viruses often result in debilitating outcomes, but that has no bearing on whether COVID does as well.
i think applying software engineering logic to diseases is fallacious. anyway, the reason you can say that is because there is basically no one left who doesn't have some sort of immunity against the virus. no immunologically naive people means better outcomes.
An interesting point from a family member who works in residential / commercial HVAC - there's enough of an improvement from installing high efficiency air filters that they can pay for themselves in increased student attendance.
> could help us end this never-ending outbreak altogether.
it has jumped to so many other species where it has established reservoirs that it'll never be gone.
this virus is going to be with the human race for at least the next hundred years.
it may very well spill back from other species into new pandemics (although those pandemics are likely to look more like the 2009 swine flu pandemic since everyone will have cross reactive T-cells).
there's nothing we do to stop this with any known or really plausibly imagined technology.
even if you could snap your fingers and wipe it out of the human race, then the problem is that the longer it goes with humans not establishing immunity to it, the worse the pandemic will be when it jumps back from the deer or mice or whatever (although that likely wouldn't take very long at all).
my point was not to make it disappear, but to develop better targets for antivirals, which effectively make it end by just shortening the disease course to 1-2 days. Right now, the rebounds that happen are mostly due to virus reservoirs within the body that aren't completely eradicated by 5 day course. More effective targeting within the body could be key. Either way, saying "nothing can be done" and just throwing in the towel when valuable info could be obtained is not the way to go. Personally, I have a general interest in the virus (though I'd never work as a virologist due to my germaphobia) so I think it's worth investigating for its own sake.
Have there been any studies that show that people treated with antibiotics against F. Nucleatum showed improved outcomes in any of comorbid diseases? I'm not saying it would actually improve anything but would be interesting to see. I assume there isn't enough momentum to run a study like that.
As long as the pathogen lives on in dental biofilm, antibiotics might have a hard time reaching it - some forms of biofilm are not really penetrated by antibiotics (one reason why H Pylori is so hard to get rid of). From there it can just spread again when the round is finished.
It’s not even clear that this strain only builds biofilm in the oral cavity. Biofilm in the GI tract has just recently become a field of interest.
Without much spoilers a super powerful thing set the universe into one direction where he's the emperor and everybody else suffer at his will because according to him all the other possibilities were even worse.
