ethbro

Like most things in a command economy, they worked on whatever was a political priority.

I'd hazard to guess it wasn't a priority in the intervening years for the same reason there was little free market incentive to address it: yes, it's bad when it happens, but it doesn't happen that often.

Ergo, they were probably just as starved of resources.

The preexisting US effort was mostly funded through DARPA for the same reasons. https://www.darpa.mil/our-research (e.g. ADEPT, P3, Prometheus, PREPARE)

It's easy to save money on developers, yet very quickly produce a net-negative result for the company.

Sadly, few companies have guardrails to prevent these sort of shortsighted choices. E.g. requiring parallel approval of projects by IT architects (whose existence admittedly carries its own hazard).

The UN exists to prevent war between great powers. All else is subordinate to that goal.

Last "nuclear war" was on 9 August 1945.

UN formed on 24 October 1945.

> Geopolitical reality doesn’t require letting authoritarian regimes chair your human rights committees.

Yes, it does. If they have large militaries and/or economies.

> The UN would be a far more effective and useful body if it took away the right to vote from authoritarian regimes. The idea of providing a UN vote to a dictator or kleptocrat who doesn’t allow a real democracy in their own country is absurd.

No, it wouldn't. The point of the UN is to avoid war, not to spread democracy [1]. The structure of the UN is a consequence of that aim.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_the_United_Nations#...

You haven't worked at a shop that mandated Team Foundation Server, have you? ;)

https://brickset.com/sets/1481-1/Pirates-Desert-Island

https://brickset.com/sets/1970-1/Pirates-Gun-Cart

https://brickset.com/sets/70413-1/The-Brick-Bounty

But that doesn't make GitHub a bad idea.

If you screen positive, you can elect to have a biopsy or scan.

If your results come back inconclusive, you can elect to pursue surgical (or other) intervention.

That's what medicine is: a selection from among potential procedures, given the information at hand, informed by previous outcomes in similar or applicable situations.

In this case, we simply have more information. If said information turns out to have limited predictive power on the ultimate occurance of cancer, that will be incorporated into detection and treatment practices.

But the important thing is having more information than we had before.

Even if the first option is "get more regular checkups over the next year+, to characterize the growth rate."

You don't have to nuke an organ from orbit, if you have historical data that indicates a tumor isn't aggressive. Or you would, if you've been watching it and it suddenly takes off.

E.g. 'Thou shalt not store & use personal data'

Overridden by 'Thou may store and use personal data, in a banking context, with clear user permission presented in an interactive graphical format, for user requests pertaining to tax information'

DENY ALL + PERMIT {SITUATION} is not a recipe for innovation.

Versus I'd say the US model is PERMIT ALL + DENY {SITUATION}.

And India's model appears to be PERMIT ALL (in theory) + ARBITRARY BUREAUCRATIC DENY (in practice).

Whereas Thompson's point seems to be that national champions effectively simplify this into the US model, albeit with a chokepoint / revenue siphon. Perhaps South Korea as a similar example?

Governments have too much incentive to purchase and distribute all they can get their hands on.

We just don't normally hear about pre-market drugs in mainstream media.

Governments essentially said "If you can demonstrate reasonable efficacy and safety, go ahead and start mass production. If your Phase III trials fail, we'll make you whole and dump the doses in a landfill."

Otherwise, you had to wait the entire Phase III duration before even starting production, whereas now you'll essentially have viable vaccine on Day 0 when the Phase III trail concludes.

Seems pretty well-named.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483

[2] Via assessment methods in the above: "pseudotyped lentivirus reporter single-round-of-infection neutralization assay (PsVNA) and by live wild-type SARS-CoV-2 plaque-reduction neutralization testing (PRNT)" & "T-cell responses against the spike protein were assessed by an intracellular cytokine–staining assay, performed on specimens collected at days 1, 29, and 43"

Specifically, discriminating against someone over 40 due to age. (29 USC § 621: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/621 )

It's benefited from 20 years of optimistic free market access.

No doubt they'll find trading partners, but it's not going to look anything like the open doors they've been used to. And they're going to start finding that their domestic and international choices now have trade consequences, rather than the look-the-other-way, laissez-faire approach the world has taken thus far.

PS: Never mention anything about this around TSA.

So even if the Chinese state may want the projects to go well, the conduit by which the projects are funded and managed doesn't have much more than shame and prison as sticks, and that's only for people who are caught.

The Soviet Union didn't collapse because a lack of capability. They collapsed because it was too expensive to forge their own way, when most of the world could pool capital via free trade.

China is big. But the rest of the world is bigger. And despotic regimes inclined to trade with an embargoed state aren't typically the most flush economic partners.

The military.

Did anyone look at the actual data? [1, Table S1-S3]

At the 100 μg 2nd dose, the most frequent moderate symptoms were fatigue (40%, "some interference with activity"), chills (26.7%, "some interference with activity"), and headache (26.7%, "repeated use of non-narcotic pain reliever > 24 hours or some interference with activity"), with no severe events reported.

In other words, pretty much what you'd expect if you asked your immune system to floor it. I wouldn't characterize these as concerning.

In all probability, we won't see sufficiently numerous cohorts until Phase II is published, Phase III is in process. Remember, this was n=15 for most arms.

> One person taking the highest dose had a 103+ fever with the second...

That's why they standardized on the 100 μg dose for Phase III [2], as a result of Phase I/II safety profile and efficacy.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/suppl/10.1056/NEJMoa2022483/suppl_f...

[2] https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

Employees there usually don't have depth of technical expertise or experience to draw from, and are incentivized to make the product sound as easy to use as possible.

This combination results in {really complicated thing} -> {simple abstraction}. Ultimately, everyone internalizes this and starts forgetting that {simple abstraction} is actually {really complicated thing}.

Happens with any popular technology. Networking, DB, cloud, ML.

Unfortunately, this flies because the primary buyers are also non-technical.