adamiscool8

The link references a specific response to remdesivir, but I don't see how the selective pressure isn't the same in the broader case of low-level or asymptomatic illness persisting in a vaccinated person, particularly when they'll be mingling more and taking less precautions.

You have to make reasonable inferences when evaluating the potential for collusion between what are arguably the two most powerful entities in the world.

Direct, of course not. Circumstantial, sure:

>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]

>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]

>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]

[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-r...

edit2: actually, I see the denominator there is total population not cases but I still don't follow.

There have been 19,850,744 cases in 18-49 year olds [0] and 63,207 hospitalizations [1] which suggests at 0.3% infection hospitalization rate..

[0] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics

[1] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_5.html#virusTypeD...

Super skewed by the cohort they cobbled together. Look at the COVIDNet data for the decile age bands of hospitalization at peak waves: [0]

>18-29: 5/100000 = 0.05%

>30-39: 10/100000 = 0.1%

>40-49: 14/100000 = 0.14%

I would ask why our agencies keep doing things like this and burning trust, but it's rhetorical.

[0] https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/COVIDNet/COVID19_3.html

In case anyone else is curious about this:

>The research, published August 18 in Nature, focused on the effect of a high-fructose diet on villi, the thin, hairlike structures that line the inside of the small intestine. Villi expand the surface area of the gut and help the body to absorb nutrients, including dietary fats, from food as it passes through the digestive tract. The study found that mice that were fed diets that included fructose had villi that were 25 percent to 40 percent longer than those of mice that were not fed fructose. Additionally, the increase in villus length was associated with increased nutrient absorption, weight gain and fat accumulation in the animals.[0]

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210818135218.h...

That's not what the article says:

>As a result, content that calls into question or denies the scientific consensus around anthropogenic climate change will not have Google advertising alongside it. In addition, Google will no longer run any advertising that "contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change."

If some evidence was proffered that Steve Jobs actually did contribute to creating Linux in 1978, as a user, I would much prefer to see that, than to have Google hide it from me because it's against the "current consensus opinion". A policy like this just seems like a recipe for disastrously persistent misinformation.

Another that was roundly mocked was Trump's idea about bringing "UV light inside the body" as a treatment. Lo and behold a year or so later.. [0]

>Ultraviolet light treatments introduced into the tracheas of five critically ill COVID-19 patients appeared to be safe and associated with a reduction in the respiratory load of SARS-CoV-2—the virus responsible for COVID-19—in all but one patient, according to a study conducted by Cedars-Sinai.

[0] https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se...

Important to note that both of these studies are on pre-Delta variant patient sets, so unlikely to represent current real world impact on transmission from vaccination. This [0] is the most recent I've seen, and it suggests the reduction in transmission against Delta is smaller and wanes rapidly, even with the mRNA vaccines.

[0] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264260v...

I know this is avoidable, and I know it’s a semi-regular occurrence, and I can recognize Google’s moderation problem is non-trivial, but I really can’t shake the feeling that Orwell was off by a letter and the future will truly just be a bot stamping on a human face forever.

I thought the trials only confirmed a reduction in symptomatic incidence?

All the countries and regions that have been "soft" captured by China over the last decade+ will do similar.

He plays for the right team, too.

Joy Reid regularly does the same. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/24/joy_reid_...

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/joy-reid-fact-check-tapper-1546432

[2] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/27/17286392/j...

I greatly enjoyed the livestreams as he puzzled through this during the early days of the war on the Invisible Enemy.

> Why do I never procrastinate?

"You have to know what it feels like to be someone you're not" is a great point, making this a great question, but as a procrastinator... I really don't know. The article would be enhanced if it provided example answers from people for whom the prompt is accurate.

It was the hospitalization rate, as cited, and the rest of your comment is unsupported conjecture...

I'm not conflating anything? I'm only pointing out, under prospect theory, people value avoiding a loss over a risk for a gain.

It's rational for someone who is currently healthy, in an age group with a 0.2% of COVID turning into anything more than a standard cold/flu, to turn down an immediate risk (orders of magnitude larger) that they will feel unhealthy for a couple days.

They did compare it to placebo, plus, humans don’t compare to placebo they compare to their status quo condition.

Not OP but the chance of hospitalization in that age bracket is about 0.2% [0] There appears to be at least a 20% chance that post-vaccine someone of that age will feel rough enough to take medication [1].

People who are currently healthy choosing to avoid the risk of immediate short-term pain when presented with a small, remote gain seems like classic prospect theory!

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1122354/covid-19-us-hosp...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/pfizer...

>DHS will also train analysts on tracking social media and how to distinguish a threat from the exercise of free speech. DHS officials say the goal is to better monitor and respond to story lines percolating on social media that could incite violence.

Where have I heard this before...

>China’s constitution affords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the opacity of Chinese media regulations allows authorities to crack down by claiming that they endanger the country. [0]

Seems like a good model for the West to follow...

>China has around two million people policing public opinion online, according to a state media report that sheds light on the country’s secretive internet surveillance operations. Dubbed “public opinion analysts,” they work for the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department, major Chinese news websites and commercial corporations

[0] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/media-censorship-china

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/07/world/asia/china-internet-mon...

Plenty of employees have no upward mobility either. Though with 10 years of positive ratings, I would think The Algorithm would reward them with more frequent/better gigs?

>The analysis by the Soufan Center, a New York-based research firm focused on national security threats, found that nearly one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon-related Facebook posts between January 2020 and the end of February 2021 originated from overseas administrators.

Less than 20% of Facebook discussion on the topic occurring outside of the US hardly suggests China and Russia are "fueling" the theories.

The author here, Michael Isikoff has a bit of reputation of being a useful dupe for US intel [1] who would love these conspiracies to be originating "outside their house".

And futher, the Soufan Center that conducted this study certainly has an ideological bent towards the US establishment [0]. Very skeptical of conclusions reached by career intel officials that suggest theories about the US establishment are baseless foreign-driven propaganda.

[0] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/07/12/isikof...

[1] https://thesoufancenter.org/about/team/

It’s almost an Android vs IPhone question. I would say you should double or triple the amount of time you’re expecting to spend administrating the system environment. I have been running a dedicated server for similar purposes for years now, and while the fun and independence is a big pro, the OS upgrades, package updates, networking issues and sole responsibility for server security can be a big con. Especially when you want an environment that “just works” to explore a random project idea. Lately due to support and maintenance issues I’ve been considering taking the plunge in the other direction and migrating fully to the cloud.

Is it possible to be anonymous online and still engage in the "online world" as most non-tech folks see it? Increasingly I think the answer is no, without substantial tradeoffs.

This illustrates the manipulatory power of doing one Google search. Their later statement said they "wouldn't rule out the possibility of an informal meeting" but it's buried. [0]

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...

>1. That means no HN.

No, it means less 230 protection for HN. Stop conflating this with destruction of the platform, it's becoming like "net neutrality". Remember when tweaking that killed the internet?

>What is the line/difference between "terrorism" and an "undirected threat"? Speaking of which, what is a terrorist organization?

The government has a clear processes to designate foreign and domestic terrorist organizations. [0] Let the actual politicians engage in that political fight. Social media companies can use the result.

>What is the difference between misinformation and libel?

Actual malice? If the standard works for newspapers, why can't it work for social media companies?

>More generally: that's just straight-up moderation, it has nothing to do with tweaks to recommendation algos. [...] If they notice an "obvious bias" and tweak the algorithm to correct for it, who decides whether that was a biased human intervention or a totally appropriate bug fix?

None of this relates. Content should not be removed or suppressed based on any political preference or designation, and that includes a fig leaf of facial neutrality. Whether it's recommended to some and not others != suppression, and it's trivial to show that your systems are based on user action not partisan interest.

These aren't sticky questions at all, they're just ways to navel gaze and avoid the obvious solutions that are inconvenient to certain actors.

[0] https://www.state.gov/terrorist-designations-and-state-spons...

Very simple. No primary moderation action should be made based on human input. Automated moderation should look for identifiable harms (i.e. illicit content, directed threats, terrorism), and absolutely nothing should be removed or blocked based on vague and nebulously defined concerns over "misinformation". Voila -- political neutrality in moderation.

That's nonsense. Showing "their algorithms and content-removal practices are politically neutral" is not an insurmountable bar. It's just inconvenient for Big Tech's supporting interests.