JamisonM

Then you use the yellow one, problem solved.

But your point doesn't stand because they aren't cyan!

"racializing all facets of everyday life, including emojis"

Every representation of humans is racialized, they exist in a social context where race exists.

Pretending that it is not and then complaining when someone says, "hey, we maybe should make it so not everything looks like white folks" is just silly stuff. Emoji diversity is good and 100% harmless!!

If you've watched the Simpsons, the "Simpsons Yellow" is white, it is clearly demonstrated in the show - Apu isn't yellow! It undermines your whole point!

Joseph Francis Ladue founded Dawson City and became a very rich man by expoiting the gold rush that way instead of mining (he ended up making some money directly from mining stakes as well in the end though). I believe his reputation and life story are certainly one of the foundations of that popular idea.

I don't know of any empirical studies of commerce in the Yukon gold rush that demonstrated that the merchants were the fattest of the fat cats in the the whole scenario though. Lots of stories of scammer and schemers making big bucks too, but again, who really knows?

Very few legitimately struck it rich on gold, that's for sure.

I don't know what the OP meant but I certainly would mean specifically "the pandemic is to blame".

If there were no discernable response to the pandemic from any organized institution in society there is a pretty good chance the pandemic itself could be blamed for a /lot/ of terrible things.

That's cap and trade, right?

Yes, I would characterize this as lying, the idea that anyone at Tesla is dumb enough to think that this is not intentionally misleading is laughable.

But Musk appears unconstrained by ethics in most things.

Giving away vaccines is a necessary if not sufficient condition for success, we can pile on additional conditions to the point of paralysis if we want.. but bottom-line, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who want vaccines that can't get them... roll those shots out!

Regardless of the margins involved, I think it is improbable that AZ would want to produce an obsolete vaccine when those facilities could be producing a better one if they have something ready to go. Its not like everyone involved here is a sociopath, they can put the money down now and renegotiate for a mutually beneficial change to the contract.

> The problem is that this option is to buy AZ's current vaccine that have a high probability of being ineffective in 18 months.

I doubt that is a "high probability" occurrence.

If it does occur and AZ makes a lot of money, I don't care. The EU has many shitloads of money to spend, spread out your bets, go to town, reward every vaccine producer with huge profits, that's what we want, we want all of the companies that bet big on developing products - successful or unsuccessful - to make money off this thing. That way if it happens again they won't be shy about giving it another go!

The rich countries shouldn't stop buying they should buy and give away for sure. Not some strings-attached bullshit but just straight-up dropping refrigerated containers of them at airports.

Politics is unfortunately going to get in the way of that.

It is a no-brainer to spend this money.

Someone in the world is going to have a use for these vaccines, buy them and then give them away if you don't need them in the end but in the meantime just book more supply. 18 months from now if the world is flushing COVID-19 vaccines down toilets due to surpluses every dollar will have been worth spending, the downsides are too great.

Your impression is correct.

The fact that it is an "old idea" is indeed unimportant, but what is very, very important is that large scale study over long periods has already been performed on that vaccination platform so we really do know a lot about it.

That means that the similarity to mRNA is a good thing in terms of any worries about unexpected consequences. Of course it also means that we know that the risk of any unexpected consequences for adenovirus vaccines is also very low.

He's not engaged in an honest discussion, he's trapped in the fallacy that you can fight a novel virus with only concrete data about that virus validated over long periods as opposed to just making fairly rational assumptions with incomplete information.

He's been wrong the whole time, and leaders that have behaved in the way he is endorsing (i.e. most of them) is the cause of the dire straights most of the world has found themselves in.

You can validate his wrongness very easily based on past statements, his statements here will be proven wrong in short order as well, but their wrongness is already obvious to anyone with an interest and access to Ontario ICU data.

Lots of comments here about locking workstations, etc. I think the answer to this sort of stuff is if you have a high-profile and important twitter account shouldn't the content actually be running through a CMS that has some sort of gated publishing system? It just takes one other person to double-check a post to makes sure that gibberish/crazy/genuinely bad stuff doesn't get published, right?

So then one actual human has the credentials for the actual twitter account in question. That's possible??

I don't have strong opinions on this topic or any particular expertise but I looked at the "cap Height" vs "point size" examples rendered to support the thesis of the article and thought to myself, "The difference doesn't seem worth worrying about, the existing system looks like it works to me."

I would love to see a "land tax" instead of a "property tax" - so if you have a bungalow on land that would be very profitable as a tri-plex you get taxed on that potential vs. on what you happened to have on the land... but that's politically infeasible unfortunately.

I'd like to say that as a rural grain farmer I would like to live in a condo in a dense and walkable neighbourhood with an excellent range of ethnic cuisine expertly prepared by my diverse neighbours.

I consider that desire just as realistic as the desire to live in a fully detached home and work in downtown Toronto.

Life is full of compromises, I'd rather not have a lawn to mow, but thems the brakes!

"Wouldn't simply ONLY building new buildings/housing be more effective?"

Yes, the vacant house tax is just politics, Vancouver has had some actual success with build-build-build but that strategy is limited by NIMBYs in many areas.

Same with downtown Toronto, the suburbs are a pricing disaster but condo prices are not following as steep a curve simply because there is supply being built.

If every empty house on the market in SF or Vancouver came on the market tomorrow it wouldn't make a dent in housing prices.

Vancouver has actually seen some price declines as recently as 2018 and CMHC says it is driven by new construction - any jurisdiction where you can't build will attract investors that can afford to sit on empty properties and still expect a reasonable return. It is just the iron law of modern real estate.

There has always been lots of support out there for 1st time home buyers, some measures have been clawed back on that front because they are obviously ineffective.

Everything else you cite here seems to be random arm waving in the general direction of capitalism.

The thing about the past was that we built a lot of housing, I think creating an environment where politicians can openly support building a lot more housing would actually address the "capitalism" problems.

Zoning is largely local though, so the actual political control of the thing that would make this situation unsustainable is held by incumbent owners.

There are of course still limitations to the impacts of higher density as well, the desired living conditions of many buyers is yard+reasonable commute, so there is an absolute physical constraint here as well.

"The fact that the US and Europe could not make masks and protective equipment because we don't even make the cloth or the machinery required to manufacture these things at scale was a shocking revelation for anyone not in manufacturing."

Problem is, that's not true!

You don't seem to be familiar with the definition of "lie" or something, I don't understand it.

"Behind the scenes, it's hard to find anything they did wrong."

Off the top of my head: They botched the China travel ban, they delayed and then botched the European travel ban, bad initial CDC tests, poor-to-non-existant data collection, planning based on keeping the virus out instead of mitigation or suppression, bad internal modeling... I think you are being silly.

Let's be clear OWS vaccine development was amazing and good, but OxfordAZ was ready at the same time, China & Russian vaccines too.

We were still importing cases on airplanes after mandatory pre-boarding PCR tests to fly to Canada so the notion that lower specificity at-home test kits were the key to unlocking the pandemic needs a lot of evidence to be compelling.

Looking at the definition of "essential" most places in the West, it was nearly everyone!

In the modern world it is much less costly to stockpile a moderate amount of excess cash flow.

There have been no real serious shortfalls of goods in a once in a century pandemic and the cash would have served anyone well!

"deadly lies"

I agree with a fair bit of what you are saying here but their behaviour in most cases does not comport with the definition of "lie".

AstraZeneca has staked their reputation as an extremely large firm that makes all sorts of pharmaceuticals on the safety and efficacy of this vaccine, the idea that they have no incentive to ensure the quality of the product is absolutely bonkers.

Hilariously Lada cars - the Soviet era cars being referenced I expect - were exported for the express purpose of making a profit!

On its face the UK has administered doses to over 25MM people thus far I believe (remarkably hard to find the exact number to date from an official source with a simple google!) and unless you are among the oldest on HN or in remarkably poor health most of those people would likely be at much high risk of complications than you would. If complications were anything but extremely rare there would be many, many cases by now.

Additionally, perhaps you are better equipped than I to know, but I believe you could control for any risk you perceive (which I think is ridiculous, but to each his own) from having someone inexperienced administering the vaccine by getting it from your GP.

As for the transmission of COVID-19, if you require absolute proof that vaccination will prevent all transmission then you are setting your bar far too high and your position is indefensible.

To start the presumption is that it is very likely that vaccination will at the very least reduce the likelihood of transmission because while there are viruses like Measles that can still be transmitted in such circumstances those cases are the exception to begin with.

Furthermore evidence is building that vaccination against COVID-19 prevents people from carrying loads of the virus that can be transmitted, if you are quite as committed to this line of argument as you seem to be I am sure you can find the published and pre-pub studies out there. I am confident that if you went about booking yourself an appointment for a month from now by the time your appointment were actually up you'd have lots more evidence to avail yourself of - and you'd always have the option of declining at the time!