data_acquired

When I taught writing in grad school, I actively (pun intended) pushed students away from passive voice. Active voice is generally easier to read, and typically forces the writer to clarify more things within a sentence. There are, of course, certain instances where passive voice better suits the context.

Academic writing is needlessly dense for all kinds of reasons other than passive voice though.

That's true. Do you know of prominent cases where law-enforcement abused the ability to remotely stop a car?

My biggest fear with these scenarios is not really the hacking but law-enforcement agencies undermining civil rights by forcing Tesla or other self-driving car-makers to redirect cars against a customer's will. I feel like an episode of Westworld alluded to this scenario at some point. I come from a country where minorities have historically had a bad time at the hands of authorities, and I can see said authorities salivating at this prospect.

The cases are being under-reported too. The question is whether deaths are being under-reported to a greater degree than cases. Even the test-positivity rates vary from state to state not only because of the extent of infection in different states but also because some states contact-trace and test while others don't. Its a mess. And to see people try to fit models to this data and fight amongst each other is darkly hilarious.

Plus, at least in the first wave in Bangalore (where I grew up), there were no instances of crematoriums melting down and such. So the under-reporting of deaths was likely not as bad in the first wave as it is right now, but the under-reporting of cases was certainly quite large as testing capacity took a while to come online.

Agreed, but I doubt that the difference in # of AZ and Moderna/Pfizer doses administered is off by too many orders of magnitude [edit : on second thought, could be off by a factor of 10]. The central issue in my mind is the difference in populations since Americans have predominantly received Pfizer/Moderna while Brits have predominantly received AZ. Its possible that Brits have an intrinsically higher clot risk with the AZ preparation than Americans do with the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines (although, the J&J clots in the US certainly questions this idea too).

"While the AstraZeneca vaccine has been the focus, other vaccines have also been reporting adverse events. Searching the EMA EV database for Moderna vaccine reports for deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism identified 29 DVTs, of which 12 also had pulmonary embolism; no reported deaths or fatal events [16]. Similarly, searching for the Pfizer vaccine reports, 13 DVTs were found in the same study period, from 17 February to 12 March, as this paper reporting on the AstraZeneca vaccine adverse events. With the Pfizer vaccine, 11 people also developed pulmonary embolism and two died [16]."

Seems to be the case that Pfizer and Moderna didn't get in as much trouble with clot risk I guess?

My bad. Have fixed the link. Thanks!

Prions are proteins, so that's not much of a risk with the mRNA vaccines. But I do get your general point. As to why J&J seems to have more side-effects, its hard to tell. More than the peer-review step (which is attacked all the time), my sense is that the clot risk is so rare that the number of participants needed to observe enough clots was much much larger than the number of Phase 3 trial participants.

As for the Sputnik vaccine (and the Sinovac one in China), sampling rare events such as these and reporting them is a function of how many people have been given the vaccine + the amount of transparency of the authorities in the countries administering these vaccines.

"Nutjobs" is still a bit harsh, no? :) I do know a fair number of people who fall into the first category (but unfortunately, know far more in the second category).

This pre-print (edit : now published apparently!) argued that the likelihood of clots from Covid was still higher than AZ vaccines https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253980v.... Fauci agreed with their conclusions (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-blood-clots-risk-...) but disagreed with the aspects of this study that looked at mRNA vaccines and blood clots (but hasn't given reasons why he disagrees with this aspect).

His arguments aside, I find calling anything to be "un-American" or "un-<insert country name>" to be annoying. Its a random nativist and unhelpfully pot-stirring sentiment to throw into an important debate. Who is Cowen or Bloomberg to be an important arbiter of what is or isn't American?

No, no large-scale pooping in rivers. Far more complicated than a single technological fix can handle.

Areas which get 2000+ mm of rainfall a year aren't always the ones with the most intensive agriculture. Water shortages are partly because of (a) the huge variation in the amount of rainfall from year-to-year in any area in India, and this variation has grown with climate change/warming (b) rivers down in the south of the country are not perennial but largely rain-fed during the monsoon. So "build more dams/infrastructure" doesn't make sense if there's not much rain to feed the rivers, (c) certain crops grown (sugarcane,paddy) just require tons of water, and are more likely to face issues due to variable rainfall compared to something like millet cultivation (d) rain is required not just for flow into rivers but for recharging groundwater, which is then used for agriculture. So, no rain = no groundwater and not just no rain = less flow in rivers.

Is it the case that the nature of projects in the defence industry is such that companies are prone to consolidation into a few large contractors? In the case of pharma, given the length of time and billions needed to go from drug discovery to market means that only large companies can effectively do R&D. Is it similar for defence i.e., long development times mean only a few large companies can effectively compete? Or is the creation of oligopolies that don't allow for competition a very conscious aspect of government defence policy?

Haha :) I've been on HN for 12+ years, and yes, statements on capitalism don't always go over very well (unsurprising given links to YCombinator). Although I will say that HN has a wider diversity of opinion on quite a range of topics than other tech forums.

To quote another Bernie, there's a fair bit of socialism for the rich in the US through bailouts when big corporations lose too much money/are too big to fail.

Agreed! Given the number of SNCF strikes the past few years, I wouldn't be surprised if this is really a victory for the SNCF unions over their Air France counterparts rather than a pro-environmental move (which is an off-shoot of the decision).

They're called grad students :)

I'm about half-way through Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model laid out in "Manufacturing Consent". Corporate ownership of media houses is said to be the first censorship filter that determines which angles of a policy debate get highlighted and which ones don't. Along with reading Matt Taibbi's "Hate, Inc.", where Chomsky's model is extended to post-internet US media, I can't begin to describe how much of the US media coverage of these issues has begun to make sense to me.

As Chomsky points out, propaganda is still useful information, since the angles being portrayed in a debate tells us what a societal elite wants us to see (and conversely, not see)

Totally! As a different commenter noted, it seems that people will consider any technological solution to warming except politically unpalatable ones.

The spectre of job losses and so on are frequently raised when it comes to transitioning away from fossil fuels --- as though the economic catastrophe from continued global warming would be lower.

Even assuming that an experiment is done for, say, twenty years, I don't know how accurately we can forecast longer- term changes (over a scale of centuries) from this move. Heck, making these forecasts without the sun being blocked out is hard enough.

This is a more useful resource than one would think. When I switched from studying math to biology, I was surprised that most graduate biology textbooks never provided these basic numbers --- average diffusion time of a protein across a cell, for instance --- which really helps in making back-of-the-envelope calculations.