vannevar

47 ms·

601.
by vannevar 5y ago
When you copy-paste a massive quote from someone else, prefacing it with "...I encourage you listen to this clip from Dr. Peter Doshi, a senior editor at The British Medical Journal, a highly prestigious medical journal:", I'
602.
by vannevar 5y ago
No, I'm not. Clinically, severe disease is (and was known to be at the time of the study) a pre-requisite for death. We don't see people with mild covid dropping dead. The study saw only 2 severe cases among the vaccinated and 106
603.
by vannevar 5y ago
Your point is well taken, but I doubt the casual reader would make the distinction that you do. And in regard to Covid deaths in the study, the people who ran it were well aware that the small number of deaths were not, by themselves, enoug
604.
by vannevar 5y ago
If you read the abstract of the study (which the author clearly hoped no one would do), you'll see this: "The efficacy in preventing severe disease was 98.2% (95% CI, 92.8 to 99.6), with 2 cases in the mRNA-1273 group and 106 in t
605.
by vannevar 5y ago
Right below the referenced table: "Today we have more data, and you can see that there were similar number of deaths in the vaccine and placebo groups . The trials did not show a reduction in death, even for Covid deaths , as opposed
606.
by vannevar 5y ago
I have to disagree about the intent to deceive here. The author circled the total deaths and indicated that the study showed no advantage of vaccination. No matter how you slice it, that is clearly wrong, and certainly a former biologist wo
607.
by vannevar 5y ago
The very first citation refutes the article. The table was deliberately cropped and blurred to make the details unclear, but if you look at the original it's obvious the table doesn't say what the author says it does (that Covid d
608.
by vannevar 5y ago
The very first reference is deliberately misleading. If you actually look at the original table ( https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2113017/suppl_f... p68), in a form not cropped and blurred to
609.
by vannevar 5y ago
Considering that the people who are adversely affected by a COVID vaccine are not the same as those who might die from the virus... That is not a given. There is such an infinitesimally small number of serious adverse vaccine reactions ev
610.
by vannevar 5y ago
This is such a clear conflict of interest with the potential for corruption that every state should require that municipal fines go to a general fund. Under no circumstances should a police department be a revenue center.
611.
by vannevar 5y ago
Right. There are all kinds of great services that could be built on top of other peoples' web sites, but most sites want to own the relationship with their customer directly. And most of the great ideas for mashup services are predicat
612.
by vannevar 5y ago
The odds of any specific virus evolving naturally are staggeringly small, looking backward, since each one is a combination of thousands of nucleotides. So what? The same argument was made in favor of divine creation.
613.
by vannevar 5y ago
Anyone interested in this field should also check out Freenet, a distributed, encrypted and censor-resistant platform that's been around for 20 years. https://freenetproject.org/
614.
by vannevar 5y ago
>Does that "savings" outweigh the increased cost from the tax? That would be a great topic for an article. It would also be a lot more work than just blustering about high taxes, so "Reason" took the easy way out. Com
615.
by vannevar 5y ago
The article is mysteriously silent regarding the savings to employers and employees by eliminating the need for employer-supplied health insurance. Without figuring that in, it's hard to take the article seriously as anything other tha
616.
by vannevar 5y ago
Thanks. I guess that goes along with the discussion in the thread above about just when capitalism emerged. I would argue that it was essentially there at the beginning of private property, but that it was overshadowed by government until t
617.
by vannevar 5y ago
The dictionary definition is pretty straightforward: "An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state." But wasn't that true
618.
by vannevar 5y ago
Of course. How is that related to the point you're trying to make?
619.
by vannevar 5y ago
>So we need to incentivise productive uses of capital, and tax unproductive uses. I would agree that this would probably improve the situation, yes, as long as the concentration of wealth isn't leveraged to drive wages down. >Wha
620.
by vannevar 5y ago
>Right but it's not capitalism as such that does that. I assume by "that", you mean the concentration of wealth. But capitalism does concentrate wealth as a mathematical inevitability, because of the strong feedback loop b
621.
by vannevar 5y ago
It looks like what you said: >I've also long been perturbed by the definition of capitalism largely focusing on markets, private property, and even entrepreneurship. Since those are like, as old as human civilization probably. It
622.
by vannevar 5y ago
>In such an unregulated capitalism system the producer would only obtain wealth by freely trading. It is the state intervention which creates the conditions for the centralization of wealth. No. You can concentrate massive amounts of wea
623.
by vannevar 5y ago
I think capitalism is great, it has a lot of benefits. But it can't just be left open-loop. You're right that the concentration cannot be avoided, but it can be mitigated so that it does not become catastrophic, which I would argu
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by vannevar 5y ago
This is a great point. But your friends are unlikely to be Senators, Representatives, or the President unless you also have substantial capital.
625.
by vannevar 5y ago
Why does the idea that capitalism has co-existed with civilization perturb you? Not criticizing, just honestly curious.
626.
by vannevar 5y ago
Why is cronyism bad? Because it distributes opportunity based on relationships rather than merit. Why is unregulated capitalism bad? Because it distributes opportunity based on capital rather than merit. But cronyism by definition operates
627.
by vannevar 5y ago
>Regulation is the pretense which enables cronyism. Sort of, if you narrowly define cronyism as government favoritism. But it would be more accurate to say that capitalism itself encourages cronyism---in the absence of regulation, there
628.
by vannevar 5y ago
Yes, the fundamental problem is that there is a strong feedback loop between capital and income, so that the more capital is accumulated, the more it produces income. In practical terms, it means that the rich can not only buy rewards for t
629.
by vannevar 5y ago
It's one interpretation of events. Another is that Putin has known all along he would need to act in Kazakhstan and staged the Ukrainian 'crisis' so that NATO politicians could go back to their constituents with a face-saving
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by vannevar 5y ago
>It is estimated that 70% of wealthy families will lose their wealth by the second generation and 90% will lose it by the third. The above uncited statistic is the only reference in the article to the title's premise. Clickbait.

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