JamisonM

I would add to this that the presumption that private school tuition reflects the cost of private school on a per student basis in its entirety and can be fairly compared to per-student funding of schools is probably incorrect. (Even more so if only comparing based on the tuition of one particular kid.)

I would suggest that the BBC rewarding Prof Bill Buchanan with a quote in a story for this silly bit of grandstanding is a bad idea.

He says, "one day we will build a digital world fit for the 21st Century ..." and I roll my eyes. At least he could follow this up with some tweets that educate his audience about how these sorts of agreement /should/ be drafted. But I suspect that he is just a drive-by critic and doesn't have any insights into how they should be drafted.

And now I feel so snarky.. the man's twitter profile says "Old World Breaker/New World Creator" .. I could only dream of growing up to be this pretentious!

But again, this doesn't really explain why US military hardware makers are concerned about this, unless the theory is that the US 5G equipment makers are pressuring the private industry groups that make military aviation equipment to pressure the US military and the FCC.. pretty far down a rabbit hole at this point with zero evidence.

And around the world 5G is not being deployed at the same frequencies! They are concerned about a particular spectrum. Lots of the purchased spectrum as I understand it is 30Gz+, they are raising zero concerns about that.

Perhaps also of interest: E-Ship 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Ship_1

In service since 2010!

Pretty sure you need a tail-wind to use a kite system, this works in any wind.

Is there some evidence to support this idea that this is "obvious" propaganda? A plausible link, like what dog does the "Aerospace Industries Association" have in the 5G network hardware market?

From my not-very-informed perspective US competitors don't need to catch up to Chinese equipment, the Chinese equipment makers are locked out. If anything the US equipment makers would have the OPPOSITE motivation, get the spectrum sold and get their sub-standard equipment into the networks before the position of the US government could possibly change and they face real competition. And that is kind of what is happening, right? The actual story here is the FCC (lead by carrier and equipment friendly folks) are seemingly pushing ahead despite concerns from other industries, no?

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most of getting a Comp. Sci. degree at Concordia University isn't actually "listen[ing] to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint". Having attended a public University in Canada myself it certainly wasn't my experience (and also not very expensive, <10K a year). Of course, as with most things in life a lot of the benefit of an activity is what you make of it, not just what is on offer to the passive consumer.

Upon completing the article my main takeaway was that the author would have been a lot better off just toughing it out at Concordia in the first place. If you are the sort of person that tries something once for a few hours and then just backs away from it entirely they way this person did.. it's really something!

In the spirit of open discussion I would like to raise to you some salient facts.

The article in question does not address the fact that I raised, and also you shouldn't make claims the authors are not making:

"Our findings, based on comprehensive surveillance and contact-tracing data from the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, provide insight into the epidemiology of COVID-19 in resource-limited populations."

Specifically: "Whereas incidence declined steadily at ages older than 30 to 39 years in the two Indian states, incidence increased at ages of ≥65 years in the United States."

So their finding might be applicable if the general trends matched but the study specifically says they don't, in the way that I generally pointed towards.

Also the study in question points to "superspreading individuals" but not "superspreading events" and that difference is significant. A "superspreader" who attends an event that can cause superspreading event, but a superspreader that goes to many places and meets just a few people at those places can super-spread! It's different! The study does NOT support your implied claim that asymptomatic spreaders can't be superspreaders.

A vaccine scaled up to 1 billion doses 2 or 3 months later would by that logic cost 120k lives.

You are assuming that there are no costs associated with one choice vs the other, but we know that is not the case.

Saying that you are not being overconfident with that level of confidence seems like a red flag.

If COVID-19 is primarily driven by superspreader events that are largely not happening anymore in the 2nd wave that is causing case increases across nearly every jurisdiction in the world I have doubts.

I am looking for 14 days quoted in the parent comment and not finding it.

> Actually, most of the spread comes from superspreading events.

I don't know if we can say this for certain at this point. I was very firmly on the "superspreader" train some time ago but I find it hard to believe given the spread we are seeing in places like Canada where most of what we thought were superspreader circumstances are now illegal. I am sympathetic to the idea but being overconfident about this stuff is also not helpful.

Gambling on efficacy would not have been a reasonable approach.

I understand the temptation to think that this would be a good way to proceed but developing a complete supply chain for a dud would have been a total disaster for everyone involved and would have taken resources away from viable vaccines.

All of the big vaccine producers had full faith in these candidates and they poured money into their production in advance of phase 3 trials and we are still supply constrained. Making the same bet a month or so earlier (the largest gain possible) would have had a small incremental gain but an enormous downside.

I think it is fair to say that they invested $2B, if it were a dead end there was a chance that the machines would not be that useful, or at least they would incur a large loss on paying a premium for them at the time.

Conversely it shouldn't be frowned upon that they invested and believed in BioNTech's methods that made it trivial to almost immediately produce a vaccine candidate on an unproven platform.

Moderna likewise had their vaccine candidate within days of having the sequence, vaccines are mostly pretty easy when your first try works!

Absolutely nothing.

In fact the acceleration in testing was mostly facilitated by the western world's absolute bungling of the COVID-19 response! If the planet were not blanketed in hotspots that match the demographic profiles required we would still be waiting for statistically significant results.

I think it is record time, as I understand it if this vaccine (and many others) had been under the regulatory regimes in those jurisdictions they would have been ahead of that pace as well. As far as I can tell the 1st phase of the Spunik V trial was injecting everyone in the building where they were developing it and fully half the participants got a fever from the vaccine: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)31866-3/full...

(The fever thing I don't think is actually a big deal, but is certainly not desirable if you want people to take a vaccine!)

The vaccines in question mostly got out ahead of their production capacity anyway too, so the difference is not consequential.

Yes! And there is also a significant number of people that do not know what populations they may or may not actually belong to!

Look at who the entity Alphabet itself donates political funds to the majority of the time. Look at which party's policies are more favorable to investor returns.

Examine which side of the political spectrum is overwhelmingly running media businesses through YouTube.

It is not Democrats.

YouTube in particular has been demonetizing channels that they think are harmful to their business for a long time, their behaviour in this instance is consistent with that.

Why would burning some marginal percentage of the very wealthiest individuals' money make everyone worse off? Seems like it would just put a slight damper on the inflation rate of country estates and enormous yachts.

(Heck, for all intents and purposes given the high marginal tax rates in many countries and the enormous amounts of waste that those governments are guilty of we're already doing just that, and the last 80ish years of human history have been pretty darn good!)

This is a sort of standard reply that seems very clever but entirely misses the point. Colonialism or any other system of injustice has winners and losers, heck even "perfectly just" systems would have winners and losers. The winners are less motivated to change the system that might create different winners, even if those outcomes are "more just" or "just as fair" or completely arbitrary in the assignment of new winners and losers. This was the basis for a lot of the colonial systems in fact, the British intentionally aligned themselves with minorities in many places to ensure a reliable partner that both profited from the rule and depended on the British to maintain their status.

Is the great Chinese famine relevant to a discussion of colonialism? Not really! The Bengal Famine on the other hand, pretty relevant! It killed a good 10 million people. Look it up!

Really it is worse than that, the media narrative pushed by the litigants is about "fraud" but most of the losing lawsuits don't even allege fraud!

> it's not like Google is going to get in

> trouble for allowing people to post about

> conspiracy theories

Actually it is exactly like that, they see lost revenue coming if they get tagged as the go-to place for misinformation on this topic. They may already be seeing advertisers complaining that no matter how much they try to screen they are still getting complaints of their ads showing up in prerolls for conspiracy videos. So they are making a public show of letting everyone know that they don't want to be in that business and they are doing all they can to stay out of it.

If they will do all they can or not, who knows? It is not like they have done all that much about QAnon.

LOL, ongoing court cases!

The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.

The business practices, profit sources, and donation habits of the Google/Alphabet on the other had point in entirely the other direction.

Particularly if you own a lot of property!

It is certainly not for me to tell you how to feel about your home country, but it is not that hard to imagine a version of the past with less colonialism and a better outcome. Consider only Thailand's example as something to think about.

"Disentangling" isn't about throwing things away and being left with nothing, it - I think - is about reevaluating what you have and what you would like through the careful consideration of the colonial legacy. The people with power in a society, even if they are not themselves "colonists" are often served well by the status quo, so a detached examination of these things is often challenging.

I think the waves and waves of "colonialism" are not really relevant to the discussion, the "modern" system of colonialism is a distinct thing, worthy of consideration in isolation and there might very well be some good to come of thinking about it. For me, I am a Canadian so I think of these things in terms of the indigenous peoples of Canada, who have had a lot of success in reclaiming something of an independent identity within Canada but still inside the larger social context. It is not a straightforward thing and it is more important to some people than to others, but it is interesting and has value nonetheless.

If you want to dispute the facts go ahead, but don't bother with this character assassination BS.

Brian Burgess is a political operative, not a journalist.

The State of Florida has all of her email correspondence at work and after firing her for insubordination the best evidence they can offer from a person they allege is such a terrible human being is that she sent an email that said "that's a wrong call" and then complying with the request.

As far as I can tell Jones' work since her firing has been fine and that the Governor felt the need to use his platform smear her just bolsters her credibility, as does this absurd police action at her house.

Why? Because regardless of the legalities here she is doing good work in a state that is committed to hiding the truth from residents.

You misunderstand the nature of Gupta's expertise and how it might relate to the issue at hand. She has also demonstrated her lack of qualifications in this matter with her public statements even in the areas where she would be legitimately qualified.

You're just goalpost moving here, the argument in the article you are citing clearly says the viruses are similar and presumes that their effects are similar on that basis. If YOU don't accept that then you don't accept your own cited authority, you're wasting your own time here on that basis.

Inspired by your citation I went out and had a look on the Internets.. a direct quote from Sunetra Gupta in May: "the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in [the UK]."

How is this a credible person to listen to? It boggles the mind, she is an epidemiologist! After making a professional error on that scale I would crawl in a hole and not come out for a year!