It is not. Healthcare and communications are very much comparable if your life and livelihood are on the line. If the downside risk for both is a dead person then they are very much morally equivalent.
1,535 karma · joined January 31, 2020
2) The research is about a group of chemical structures called Porphyrins, commonly found as part of a human proteins. They are apparently a good fit as delivery vehicles to send anti cancer drugs into cells. Apparently these particular chemical structures have inherent anti-cancer properties too. This is a very simplified explanation and I have not read the paper itself. This is a chemistry/biochemistry paper as much as it is a biology paper.
3) It is very difficult to explain to a layman whether a research is truly useful, or whether it will end up as a dependency (to use a software engineering term) of a bigger research. Imagine somebody made a marginal improvement to a neural network model. By itself it is not revolutionary, but the incremental gains add up over time. This is an incremental gain, a lot more work and research will be needed to turn it into a possible therapy. And even then it may hit some snag down the road that will render it useless. Science is tedious and expensive.
Another issue is that CS is a branch of applied math that also happens to be extremely profitable. Math operates on much larger timescales than other domains. But business and economics demands immediate attribution. McCulloch and Pitts had their Hebbian neural network almost a century ago. Kleene of the Regex fame designed his neural network in 1951 [0]. These vast timescales are quite normal for advanced mathematics. But in 2010 GPUs became cheap and the obscure theories of the pre-GOFAI age are suddenly immensely profitable. Of course the names and associations would be with their most recent implementors. The ones who actually applied and made it possible, rather than those whom dreamt it up a century ago.
Step 1) Acquire a large standing army, logistics, and lots of rockets and big radars (the bigger the better, stealth planes are very tricky to detect without massive antennas). Step 2) Nuclear weapons, ICBMs, and stealthy submarines. Step 3) Sufficient infrastructure to support autarchy and the above two steps.
In the current age, without the patronage of a larger state, starting a country ex nihilo with the expectation that it will remain sovereign is not possible (surprisingly you don't hear from Thiel's pet think tanks about the sovereignty problem when it comes to building a country in the middle of the sea, you would think the founder of Palantir should have some creative solutions).
Modern assymetric war doctrine relies on air superiority. Deny other countries the skies and you will be free. You don't really need a conventional navy if you don't plan to project force. Countries like Iran use a large fleet of small boats armed with rockets to counter bigger navies (and more importantly, carriers. Their boat swarm strategy however is untested outside of simulations). A country is built on legitimate violence. At the end of the day, the nuclear triad is the only and ultimate guarantee of true territorial sovereignty. Legitimacy will come naturally when sovereignty becomes absolute.
Sovereignty in political science and international relations lie on a spectrum. Countries like Cuba have quite limited sovereignty[0]. A fully nuclear armed seasteading state may never achieve economic sovereignty due to sanctions by incumbents, but it will definitely have full perpetual control of its territories and in the current multipolar world, there are plenty of opportunities to increase economic sovereignty.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/cuba-the-u-s-and-the-conc...
(For those who don't get the joke, see Front: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25272533)