adrianb

The paper has earned an expression of concern regarding its peer review process, I don't think many scientists rely on it at the moment:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620987756

Not impossible, but how plausible is that a farmer sells his animals in a single location in a big city more than 1000 km away? More likely the animals would be sold closer to his farm or sold in multiple big cities igniting separate outbreaks with distinct lineages.

Viruses escaping from labs are also well-established, frequently occurring incidents [1]. Both should get attention and investigative effort.

[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...

If anything, this is an amazing insight onto how the media will report anything from a press release without a minimum of investigation. The name change was essentially breaking news everywhere.

- they're changing the almost 100 years old name with... a pun on that name? Even a teenager would see it as a joke.

- the announcement comes out 2 days before April 1st and is deleted from the website shortly after publishing?

- the media packages it as an amazing "leak" and spins it into VW attempting to distance themselves from the diesel scandal?!

I'm worried if we trust a press that can be so easily and obviously misled.

Obituaries are prematurely published all the time. I'm surprised April's Fools aren't published early more often.

Indeed, I wouldn't look too much into this. The article is more a part of the media's anti-tech campaign and less an indication of the overall investor sentiment. We'll see in the IPO how it actually performs.

Downdetector [1] shows some problems with other websites including Twitter and Microsoft as well. Doesn't seem like a cloud provider being down though.

[1] https://downdetector.com/

Sure, but we're comparing making x in salary in Europe and paying out of pocket for private healthcare if needs arise, or making 4x in US and having employer-sponsored private health insurance.

I know this is not everyone's experience, just comparing the choices of Sw Engs.

Obviously not data but here's something that's a common joke in the Netherlands:

https://www.cursor.tue.nl/en/news/2016/januari/take-a-parace...

Every inhabitant is entitled to excellent healthcare doesn't always mean they also get it.

I lived in 2 European countries with amazing healthcare systems available for free or almost free but had either: amazingly long waiting times (measured in years) for anything but the most basic interventions OR an amazingly difficult process to get referred by your GP into any specialist care (GP generally recommends paracetamol and rest for everything).

So while the US has an overall broken system, as a highly-paid engineer with private employer-sponsored health insurance in the US you might be more likely to access the high quality healthcare you need.

And I think a valuable COVID lesson is: once a natural process is started (the virus spreading worldwide) we don't have much power to stop it. But we can successfully mitigate it by developing vaccines in record time and manufacturing them in large scales.

Similarly, for global warming it would be a waste of time and effort to try to stop the natural process (limit human activity to revert the temperature increase) and instead focus our innovation and resources into mitigation (carbon capture, green energy, fortifying coast lines...)

And don't forget that countries have different ways to count COVID deaths. In the UK it's everyone who dies of any cause within 28 days of a positive test. Some other countries only consider COVID deaths if the patients had pneumonia.

And depending on the testing (availability, sensitivity) the death counts could be underestimated as well.

It will be an interesting challenge to get compatible statistics from different countries.

That has been my question for years.

Back in the day when I was only hearing of this thing called the Internet, people mentioned how they can read the New York Times online or another famous paper. Coming from a small town in Eastern Europe that was amazing.

But I also wondered why they were able to read it for free. I wonder what made the newspapers post their content online for free - probably because the internet was a fringe curiosity and they only realized it's becoming important when it was too late.

The link posted is cute and all but such initiatives are so easy to dismiss - what, you guys can't live without going to a bar? What are you, some kind of alcoholics? You don't want to save some lives?

When in reality the lockdowns ask us to give up everything that makes us human - closeness and interaction with other people, hobbies, and many people can't even work or see their families any more. And we're making this effort without even being sure it's worth it - sure, there's a vaccine now and that's an amazing achievement but we still have the risk of vaccine resistance so long-term not sure how we can avoid the (mitigated) risks.

Dutch young people do have student debt though afaik. Wouldn't rising rates affect their payments?

He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).

What worries me the most is when people use the phrase "a majority of experts agree that..." and imply that is the absolute truth. It's not.

A majority of experts, in their day, agreed that the sun is rotating around the earth. A majority of experts agreed that time and space are absolute. And since it's trendy these days to declare absolute medical truths, a majority of experts agreed that disease is caused by imbalances of bodily fluids and that bloodletting is the cure to any disease.

> media narratives - from reuters as well as others - about "reddit attention shifting to silver"

That was amazing. It took a few weeks of WSB going on GME before the media noticed, and by that time I was sick of how everything on Reddit was about that. And then one morning all news outlets talk about silver and I had seen nothing of the sort on reddit.

This makes me worried the modern reputable media is just an echo chamber, always promoting the same stories with the same views and never investigating anything.

Interesting. How are these contracts supposed to work? In general when I buy something and have to wait, I expect to get it before everyone who buys after me. Not sure how these contracts work.

Philips the company now only operates in the medical market, the lighting division is a spin-off that still uses the Philips brand:

> In 2018, the independent Philips Lighting N.V. was renamed Signify N.V. However, it continues to produce and market Philips-branded products such as Philips Hue color-changing LED light bulbs

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips

The old software development model where users are buying the license for a specific version of a program and then use it and only come back to spend more when they need an upgrade is pretty much dead now. Most software moved to either free downloads with paid support (even Windows these days?) or to membership-based model (Adobe, Office365).

The reason is that as you add features and fix bugs in a software, fewer users need the upgrade (why spend another 150$ on this year's release for some features I never use?). But the development team still needs to be paid and the advanced features they add each year tend to be harder to implement, so over time the costs are increasing while sales go down.

Adobe might be successful with this business model because they have a strong market in professionals but they definitely lost the amateurs and hobbyists.

EDIT to add: also it didn't help that CPUs and OS APIs haven't had major changes in more than a decade. There was no major reason for a large majority of users to upgrade (such as the move to 64 bit CPUs).

This gives a good impression how much that reduces the footprint compared to the commonly blamed activities:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...

I agree. The unverified information needs to be investigated by the relevant authorities (prosecutors and the justice system). Under normal circumstances the information would be swept under the rug.

Yup. People in the West don't understand how much of an advantage social media has been in countries where media was always controlled by corrupt businessmen or politicians.

The fact that information about government's actions can spread to a large number of people, without any control from authorities is a first time in history for many. Organising protests without government censorship. Publishing investigations. Alerting the entire country to corruption as it happens.

It's really life-changing and unfortunately I don't think it will last. It's already routine when civil unrest happens to shut down internet. Facebook is a good one to censor but other networks take its place so creating Great Firewalls is next for many (somewhat rich) governments.

Honestly, so much of this sounded familiar to me ... but from my own teenage years. My parents were appalled at the amount of time I was spending at a MS-DOS PC (not only playing games but also learning programming).

So I'd say that no, it's not that phones are like crack. There seems to be a disconnect on the parent's expectations when children discover the possibilities of a technology that's unfamiliar to them. In the article they're talking about the ease of controlling TV time but that doesn't even compare in possibilities of communication, entertainment and education.

Heck... I'm sure if you could go back in time you'd discover the first generation to grow up with books, and their desperate parents noticing how the kids aren't ... working the fields and feeding the cattle, I guess.

It's interesting that all the big tech companies except Google are invested in OSM, but at the same time none of them bought one of the classic, "traditional" digital map makers - Here Maps formerly Nokia, formerly NavTeq and TomTom formerly TeleAtlas. They would certainly have the budget so I wonder why they weren't interested?

Do they think it's better to pool their resources into one digital map data source? Are the traditional makers using too much legacy tech?

No way it was a real lab. Too much risk to reveal something just from the tools or devices present. The viewers would analyze every pixel visible and it’s too much effort to clean up a real lab of what secrets it could reveal and a lot easier to build a real-looking lab out of things you can safely display.

Not sure if such a lab would be even open to all employees at Apple from what I hear.

Here's my understanding (also a layman but trying to read as much as possible):

A new coronavirus jumps from an animal to humans. No human body has seen this type of virus before, so when it infects the immune system has to work a lot to learn how to fight it. This causes symptoms like a fever which is a sign of the ongoing struggle. For frail people it means the immune system is not strong enough to counteract the infection and it spreads and potentially kills them.

However, if the immune system learns quickly enough how to fight it, antibodies are killing the virus faster than it can multiply and you get better. The antibodies then disappear in a few months but the long term memory cells remain.

Later, the virus infects you again. You develop the symptoms of a light respiratory infection but the immune system quickly references the memory cells and is able to produce suitable antibodies really fast. The fight is short and easy, the antibodies defeat the virus before it has time to spread. There is no sign of the struggle like first time (no fever) but only the light symptoms we don't even think of (common cold).

Now, how about children? Well as we see already they're unlikely to be seriously affected (low mortality). And children get lots of fevers (parents can confirm). So probably sometimes in the early years we get infected by some coronaviruses our bodies have never seen, the immune system puts up an intense fight and builds the long-term immunity that will be with us as adults.

Extrapolating from other coronaviruses, it's probably that you CAN catch it again but it's "very unlikely" to produce serious consequences after the first time.

So basically only first time you will experience more serious symptoms like a fever, the subsequent infections would be trivial common cold.

We'll see.

This reminded me of the abuse internet fans are subjecting GRRM to. Probably also because he used to be involved with the online communities.