I beg to differ. "AI" is already rejecting CVs and untransparently keeping people unemployed. People do care about how to use this tool responsibility.
Good. But at the same time it should be possible to buy through private channels. So we can circumvent and get rid of the terribly inefficient bureaucrats.
The EU could've issued an export ban for Covid vaccines like the US and UK did but did not want to. There would have been 34 million more doses available until the end of March if they had done it.
But even in these times, the EU rather supports their allies than revert to nationalism. It could pay dividends in the future.
The UK does not formally restrict exports but it didn't export a single dose to the EU despite AZ telling the EU that they would. This lead to the export controls the EU put in place where the EU can forbid exports into countries that don't export themselves. AZ exported 9 million doses into the UK, the UK didn't export a single dose back.
The UK most likely sent them to Australia because Italy blocked AZ exports to Australia.
The AZ doses that the EU did not receive were from plants based in the EU run by European companies fulfilling AZ production. The UK government even invested £55m over a year ago in one such EU-based plant to bring its capacity up after the Dutch government didn't.
I completely agree. USA has been hoarding millions of doses of then unapproved AstraZeneca (in USA) while central Europe was hit so hard my home city was thinking about changing Hockey stadium to giant morgue since they run out of capacity.
UK received millions of dozes of AZ from European factory, it was never the case other way around.
I may be biased, and I would like to be wrong here. Please tell me how USA and UK helped Europe with vaccines, how they did not succumb into deepest nationalism.
I never witness somebody from USA or UK acknowledge this. Only some comment from Canadians being grateful that they receive vaccines from Europe while USA is not exporting any. (I know this changed later and they started export to Mexico)
Well, dugs like vaccines are not sold to private parties. At least in country I know.
EDIT: To clarify, vaccines are not sold without a prescription. At least not that I am aware of and where I life. So for me, a sale to a private party was understood as "you walk in and order it". Obviously you can do that with a prescription. That being said, doctors practices are already administering the Covid shots in the EU. Not as unbeaurocratic as the US so.
They are in Europe. You can go to your family doctor and ask for a flu shot even if you are young and don't get it recommended by default. Same as you can go to your doctor and ask for lots of other vaccines because you want to travel abroad for instance. I paid for many vaccines in private in Austria in order to travel to certain countries. Don't see why I shouldn't be able to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine the same way.
Ah, sure. But the produceris selling to the doctor who is then administering the shot to you. Quite different from you buying the shot for yourself. Without an ordonance from a doctor you wont get a vaccine.
> Without an ordonance from a doctor you wont get a vaccine.
Like many people are trying to explain to you, you're just talking nonsense. You can get many vaccinations commercially without any kind of prescription in most western countries.
Many countries even have commercial chains of shops that do this - for example example here's a price list of a company in the UK.
And you can walk in there and buy it like, say, a bottle of oke? Not without going through a doctor before hand, the same doctor who administers the shot after you picked it up at the pharmacy.
It doesn't have to be the same doctor, but anyway a doctor is not a bureaucrat and buying medicine with a prescription is something that only involves private parties (unless you want to be reimbursed by social security when it exists of course, then social security is obviously involved and it might be public).
If you're advocating for the end of mandatory doctor's prescription for all medicine that's your right, but it's rather doubtful that it would be an improvement over the current system.
Here in the US my doctor is a “private party”. They don’t work for the government, they work at a private business. Nor do I need their involvement to get a vaccine.
The pharmacist at my local grocery store can legally prescribe me a vaccine on the spot at my request, and an assistant can administer it. The pharmacy in my local grocery store is also a private business. For all intents and purposes, yes, I walk into a pharmacy and buy a vaccine.
Here I walk into a pharmacy and say I want a vaccine. They do some paperwork and give it to me. No doctor visit required.
My doctor can give me a vaccine, but it has been a long time since I got mine there. I generally the pharmacy because they give me a discount on some sort of item I'd buy anyway.
Yes, especially for vaccines that are not on a schedule, but given in specific travel circumstances, in many places in Europe you can buy the dose, store it for a few days in your home fridge and then go to a nurse to have it administered (and logged if you need proof).
For many of the vaccines you can just go and buy them and store them yourself without any special permission or prescription. Usually you do not want to do it, simply because it is easier for the immunization clinic to take care of it.
Well yes, that is how you can buy influenenza and many other shots in many many EU countries. I once drove to another country (yo Portugal) to buy a specific vaccine for my sisters kid. Their region had ran out. After getting it from pharma I drove straight to the nurse where they were waiting to get the shot but the kind pharmacist also told me I can store it ik my fridge.
I didn't say anything about the rich. A vaccine costs pounds, everyone can afford it. Only thing preventing you from being covid protected is a random lazy bureaucrat in Brussels.
Bureaucracy, and scarcity. Personal freedom to buy it would be great if there were more than plenty for everyone, but right now they should be given to those who have a much higher risk of severe complications and/or death. Not even the US allows private selling right now.
When dealing with complex dynamical systems (such as markets), you don't get exact answers. You get general phenomena which require intelligence to understand.
But in this case, the answer's very simple, and in my opinion, very obvious: High-risk people value the vaccine more, and allocating a proportion to the open market gives them the option of paying for one instead of having to wait for government permission. This is a first-order effect, not even a second-order effect.
The second-order effect would have been that more people might have been incentivized to create a vaccine if you opened the door for more profits. Right now there are lots of individuals throughout the world who don't have access to a vaccine.
So the fact that the EU will not renew a contract at expiration in favour of other providers is impacting your freedom?
The underlying truth is that a lot of Brits have identified with AZ, and any "attack" to the vaccine feels like a personal attack to their country and their identity to them... You seem to be in that category.
You must be delusional. What's preventing you from being vaccinated is the scarcity of vaccines, and those being allocated to the people that need them most, instead of those that pay the most. If they were sold on the free market the price would rise rapidly above the current price, as demand outnumbers supply by at least an order of magnitude.
Western 'Free markets' are not free at all, and the sale of these vaccines could be regulated to a fixed price.
In the meantime, the state has taken a monopoly on the distribution of these vaccines and has even stopped administering them, so while they are available, they are locked away.
I predict for later this year, we will see news reports of batches of vaccines being safely disposed of ( destroyed ).
You see totally different demographics between software design/development and the politics of software.
In this letter I see names that have never done anything significant, yet they feel entitled to correct one of the forefathers of software development.
That's because they are first and foremost victims.
These people aren't interested in working and contributing to this field. They are interested in benefiting from it. Any successful endeavour will attract freeloaders like moths to a flame and that's exactly what we are seeing here.
We can compare the audience of an flamewar post about racism in US, vs the readership of a paper on fixed point theorems, and it makes sense that organizations that don't care about science like US universities choose to favor the former.
From a business perspective it must be more lucrative to select candidates by their cultural projection and the money connections than on the basis of academic potential.
I suppose that is true for MIT, for mainstream media, and for US corporations.
Sounds awesome. Citizens don't owe anything to the government, we shouldn't be born with a liability towards the government, we should be born free and be in total control of our finances, and be free to choose the hosting city that offers us the most.
No wealthy person became wealthy on their own. Almost by definition they participate in a market, which can only be established by some kind of state-like entity to prevent descent into chaos.
The marvels of modern life are all due to the stability and infrastructure provided by government. For one to rise to a high level of wealth by exploiting public resources, then simply abscond with their pile of gold, is to breach the social contract that enabled them to rise so high in the first place. It's pulling up the ladder.
I disagree that it’s a government in itself that makes this possible. I believe it’s the restriction of predatory governmental practices that allows for a flourishing free market. A descent into chaos is prevented by an impartial legal system and police force, neither of which technically require a government. Chaos erupts when there is no fair third party to appeal to for resolution of disputes or protection from violence.
Does it really matter? We live in a time where there’s no necessary relationship between the government that you pay taxes to and the one that supports the people who pay you. That’s what remote work makes possible. You’re suggesting that free movement is wrong and that people owe a debt to whichever government they happened to be raised under.
What is the reason for the US to charge an exit tax to someone that was born in the US, is raised and makes a fortune in Chile, and then that person decides to renounce his/her US citizenship ?
Indeed! Powerful individuals should be free to exploit their fellow man without any interference from the plebs banding together! There's a Galts' Gulch in Chile that you might be interested in. They have no government at all there.
Do you hold money in a bank? Do you buy goods and services from corporations? You realize that you are not contracting with an individual when you do this, and the bank or corporation will continue to have your account in their (computer) systems long after any specific individual has left the company, because it doesn’t belong to any specific individual?
Everywhere you go, you enter into agreements with the people who are affected by your actions.
Money is just a paper or digital asset representing how much other people or organizations owed you and cleared by sending this asset.
Even property ownership itself is just a result of laws passed by certain jurisdictions. They vary from place to place and are balanced against other rights. Property rights make sense for small amounts of property but as you come to “own” larger and larger amounts of capital, you simply expect the system to scale indefinitely, without changing, but that is not necessarily a reasonable expectation. Just like you can’t just scale up an ancient ship and expect everything to work.
What you’re really saying is that someone owes you the safeguarding of your large amount of money because they are being paid some of this money to do so. You want to be able to unilaterally centrally plan where it’s going to go, including sending massive amounts out of a town or community just because it found its way into your accounts.
But all your “principles” ironically are just extrapolations of rights and affordances given to you by a state or other organization that has been running things in an orderly manner. The reality is the other way around - no organizations owe you the safeguarding and enforcing of a monopoly on the unlimited use of {insert resource here} while you unilaterally get to exclude all others from using this resource more productively. You want to centrally plan how the resource will be utilized and you get upset that your “slippage” (eg progressive taxes) is getting bigger and bigger!
I don’t think you voluntarily chose the city or country you were born in. Taxation is like paying rent. Would you use this argument to say that you get to squat rent free in an apartment because you were brought there after birth by your parents and you never signed a lease? The only reason you don’t think about this is because the apartment complex is small. The larger the organization, the more likely it is that you were born there. And you just have to realize that this organization doesn’t “owe you” anything other than the rights it has agreed to guarantee all its citizens.
If you want to find a jurisdiction that will be willing to enforce your property rights above every other right of all its citizens, you’re welcome to try to immigrate there, leaving your family and others or taking them with you. Maybe the Honduran cities are such a jurisdiction, or the high seas, but you’ll probably find they are not. And the jurisdiction you are moving from has no obligation to let you move any arbitrary amount of money out of it.
You don’t really choose where you live unilaterally. Wherever you go, people have already formed organizations and have jurisdiction with laws, and by moving there, you have to agree to abide by those laws. If you have ever traveled, you’ll know this is the case!
And no, it’s not “stealing” when it’s according to the laws of the jurisdiction. And furthermore, stealing implies that it’s your property to begin with. You should look up the difference between Sovereign/Alloidal title and Fee Simple. Read up on property laws. Your revenues are simply numbers in the account of a banking system chartered by your jurisdiction.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. High-wealth individuals need organizations to enforce their property rights. At the same time, we have gravitated towards democratically managed organizations when it comes to running our cities and states. That is why, for example, there are rent control laws, easements and many other restrictions on what you can do with your property. It’s what the majority of the people want, although the few who amassed a great deal of the currency may not.
My question is ... why does any organization owe you to enforce your monopoly ownership of resources and let you unilaterally exclude others from using them? Is it better for society to let high “net worth” individuals to centrally plan where the resources will be diverted, and at a whim move arbitrary amounts out of a town, emptying it of jobs and resources?
Let me put it in stark terms. Should a city allow a few individuals to buy up arbitrary amounts of its fresh water reservoirs, removing them from being collectively managed? Once that they “privately own them” should the city allow the individuals to pollute them for profit, subsequently moving out and taking the profits from externalizing the costs to the people living there? It may result in “more revenue” to the city in terms of job creation, and cheaper goods, but can do you agree there is a trade-off?
Okay, you claim 50% taxation is beneficial for all. It's highly debatable.
But the point it's that taxes should be phrased and understood for what they are, a whitewashed extortion. It has no proportion at all with costs of running a rule of law society. Be grateful that we take just 50% from you because we could take everything!
Well you paint a very gloomy dystopian picture, with scarcity and fighting for every square inch.
This issue is present in any political system, even full egalitarianism, increase population by an arbitrary amount to reduce land per citizen to an epsilon.
Provided you are a good neighbour, it will always be possible to find space to rent at the marginal cost, without a rent-seeking political class.
Just replace the word “taxation” with “rents” and imagine that each city is owned by an individual and it’s their own private property. Suddenly this becomes OK under anarcho capitalism, right? Such private cities exist, eg Walt Disney World.
So now, imagine that each city’s owner chose to “go public” and sell shares of the city to each citizen equally, and they put in place bylaws. So now you have a democratic society.
In fact that is how cities like Boca Raton came to be owned by the residents. How is paying taxes to the city of Boca any different in your view than paying rent to locate your business in Walt Disney World?
Agreed, if anything more migration opportunities would be much better for those who are poor. A semi-recent article put the value of free movement globally at an additional $78 Trillion for the global economy
I think part of the idea is that weapons systems have changed such that if another country invades, what exactly would they capture? Laptops? Maybe the people - and then what? You're going to make them be as productive as they were but working for your regime? Plus, small nations with asymmetric warfare opportunities - e.g. you're a small city and you have a big aggressive neighbor, why not create a bunch of cyber attacks that can be triggered at any moment rendering the value of any attack moot or negative. Agreed for islands where the intrinsic value isn't the human capital this might be a serious concern, but I doubt it for a place like this.
I think you're being sarcastic but exactly! It basically worked for North Korea and I bet Ukraine wishes they held onto theirs these days. But idk if even something as powerful as a nuke is needed, you just need some measure that makes attacking the place less valuable than not. Personally, that screams cyberwarfare to me (e.g. yeah you can take our city but by the time you do I will have shut down your electric grid and financial market for a few days) but who knows
en.wikipedia.org has around 260 million page views per day. Each page view consists of multiple HTTP requests (picking a few random pages shows twenty or more per page) - so I'm pretty sure that wikipedia has higher traffic figures.
Both wikipedia and pypi requests are >99% readonly and cacheable, and neither have strict global consistency guarantees. That makes them very cheap and technically easy to run through a free global CDN like cloudflare.
It seems wikipedia english gets 255m per day. This doesn't include all of their image hosting and other side services though. I think those are in the many hundreda of millions if not billions. Id say they are at least comparable.
It's kinda moot though. I wouldn't begrudge pypi asking for money either.
Okay, so they looked for correlations with a million conditions and when they found a vaguely significant one they automatically suspended the vaccination campaign prolonging by days or weeks the national lockdown.
