hraedon

That we currently don't universally oppose and sanction wars of conquest and aggression doesn't mean that we shouldn't. The invasion of Ukraine is an especially egregious example, and it is good that the world is unifying to disincentivize that sort of aggression.

Like, the US at least attempted to invent a casus belli for Iraq, and it was one that Saddam couldn't aggressively contest without revealing Iraq's weakness to Iran. Gaddafi was deposed because his administration killed protestors and provoked a civil war. Yemen is a proxy conflict against Iran and while our involvement is indefensible the goal of the aggressors isn't to annex the country.

Even Russia has benefited from this ambiguity: the international response to the Russian seizure of Crimea was very limited, and there was essentially no organized sanction over their campaign in Syria (which included at least one attack on US soldiers).

In this conflict, Putin's speech ahead of the invasion of Ukraine made it absolutely clear that there is nothing provoking this conflict beyond Russian imperialism. The erroneously published document outlining the rationale assuming a Russian victory confirmed those sentiments [1].

Ukrainian resistance bought time for a coordinated response and the personal heroism and charisma of Zelenskyy (along with strong American leadership in the background) galvanized Europe. A hard line against wars of conquest is a good one to draw and rally around, even if it isn't perfect.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/russian-state-news-published...

The problem is that they aren't offering the same service. The payment processor is not maintaining the ecosystem or doing anything outside of the relatively narrow scope of accepting payments and maybe dealing with taxes.

Even if you think Apple's (and Google's, and Microsoft's, and so on) cut is too high, the idea that the entirety or even the bulk of the value that they offer is strictly in facilitating transactions is incorrect.

Even granting that the current admissions truly are need-blind (which I think it is reasonable to dispute), the smallest Ivy endowment is still over $4 billion. We’re not talking about a state university using full freight foreign students to subsidize in-state students because they have no other choice.

There’s no reason sticker price tuition at Brown needs to be almost $60k a year, and it is scandalous that Harvard, Princeton, and Yale charge tuition at all.

I guess it depends on your definition of "corrupt" and where you draw the line between corrupt and not corrupt. Would it be the tech recruiter's fault if there were, for instance, a pipeline problem that sharply limited the diversity of their candidate pool? I don't think so, but that wouldn't change the reality that the pool itself is a reflection of corruption elsewhere in the system. I don't know how you could possibly argue otherwise when black people and women were effectively excluded from many industries until relatively recently.

The "meritocratic process" is laughable. Legacy admissions have always been a critical component of those systems, especially once wealth was no longer an adequate filter; allowing a few newbies through the sieve in order to conceal the real purpose of the ivies—perpetuation of an elite caste—has been the game for a long time. As universities are pressured from the left (getting rid of standardized testing) and right (getting rid of any sort of racial consideration in admissions), legacy will only become more important as an attribute. That a few people beat the odds doesn't at all imply that the system is fair or that that solution is scalable.

"Culture fit" is realistically both important and historically has been a really problematic thing to conflate with or consider alongside "merit." It is a tough problem and I don't have a great answer to it.

I don't disagree, but my point was that they shouldn't. Clarence Thomas famously wrote about believing that his own success was tainted by affirmative action, and later he was indeed appointed to the Supreme Court primarily because he was a black conservative. That doesn't mean he was unqualified or less fit for the court than previous appointees, no matter what his own insecurities were, and it also doesn't mean that he or our society would have somehow been better served by Clarence Thomas not being given any of the opportunities affirmative action programs may have afforded him.

The deeper problem is that there isn't really a solution here. The old system wasn't neutral and instead actively discriminated against huge swathes of the population. That the beneficiaries of that system never doubted their worthiness doesn't make the old system better, and any change that impacts them will suffer from the same aspersions about a lack of "merit" that we are seeing now.

This mostly tongue-in-cheek carve out was for the fortunately stalled initiatives for outsourcing these decisions to AI tools, but to me it also applies to filters that are blindly applied and never reviewed.

If 100 applicants are rejected for byzantine/opaque reasons without ever being reviewed by a person, I think it is not unreasonable to characterize those exclusions as decisions not being made by the people in the company. Of course, someone in the company did decide to implement and use the filter, so I wouldn't argue the point very strongly.

I know what the conversation is referring to, and my response is in regards to the naiveté demonstrated by responses like yours. The problems of today are different only in particular application, not in motivation or nature.

"Merit" as I understand it—who can best perform the job—has almost never been the primary hiring characteristic. Companies are comprised of people and those people are almost always the ones making the ultimate decisions. In hiring, this means that "merit" almost always means something different or is a secondary consideration behind more personal factors. "Is diverse" doesn't really strike me as inherently more corrupt a trait than "went to the same school I did" or "is a member of the same country club I am," though why it gets a lot more attention is certainly not a mystery.

Whatever problems the current system has, it isn't as if the system being replaced ever hired people primarily on "merit."

The beneficiaries of the older system rarely wondered if they were the best candidates for the job, so why should anyone today give it a second thought?

Going through this gish gallop point by point:

mRNA technology has been in development since the 80s because there were and are a lot of challenges with deploying it on a wide scale. This Nature article [1] goes into it, but a lot of the foundational elements of the vaccines were only developed in the last several years.

The need for immunity for the makers is because these vaccines were developed very quickly and administered through EUAs, since the low chance of long term side effects was deemed less harmful than the time constraints that would have been required for normal approval. This need was codified into law back in 2005's PREP act, invoked by the Trump administration in February of 2020, and the legal immunity only lasts until 2024 [2]. If everyone who got an mRNA shot develops myocarditis in 15 years, Moderna et al won't be immunized from those lawsuits.

Pfizer/BioNTech is currently the only fully approved vaccine, but they aren't going to pull EUAs for other vaccines when supply constraints are still an issue. Pfizer is widely available, but it isn't universally available and keeping other options (themselves going through the process for full approval) available is not unreasonable.

Moderna was founded with the idea of commercializing mRNA technology. This is the first significant commercial use of mRNA technology. It doesn't really seem like a big mystery to me.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-c...

Where was ivermectin authorized for use as a COVID treatment? It certainly wasn't approved in the US and it also wasn't (and isn't) authorized in Japan, before or after the date of your WaPo article.

I mean, literally the first chart is so misleadingly cropped that it makes the opposite point in this article than it does in the original study.

Edit for the above comment's edit: look, if a deceptively cropped chart doesn't qualify as "misinformation" for your purposes, I guess I'll leave you to do your own research.

It depends on whether or not those iPhone users have turned off iMessage out of some misguided sense of protocol purity. If some but not all have it turned off, their experience will be similar to an android user in a chat with iMessage users (ie, terrible).

If everyone has it turned off, it is just the normal group SMS experience (also terrible). SMS group chat isn't gone, you just very rarely see it because there is almost no reason for an Apple user to disable iMessage.

All sentiments like this one and those similar to it elide the facts that 1) we’ve tried relying on “user responsibility” before, and excusing the comically bad outcomes through victim blaming doesn’t change them; and 2) we didn’t get together and vote Apple the only manufacturer of computers.

If you don’t like their model, choose someone else. Why should average users who would otherwise be served perfectly well by Apple’s solution be required to be “responsible” for some subset of personal security you think denotes a “responsible” citizen from an “irresponsible” one?

Because it isn't a new problem? Apple could have locked out Asahi at any time, but have shown no inclination of doing so. There's no reason for them to build a feature that facilitates this specific use case and then remove it in a future version.

Assuming for the sake of argument that they did, what you're left with is what you had before: having to build the process around format changes to Apple's supported process. The Asahi devs went into this project knowing that they were working around Apple's internal needs, and having to revert back to their original solution and its tradeoffs at some undefined future point isn't an existential threat to the project.

"iMessage's .gif handling was a bit sloppy" is a believable problem; the idea that it was done deliberately to facilitate access to what amounts to a VM running in an old image compression format is a big stretch.

This isn't like goto fail, and even that one could be explained by developer oversight.

Apple offers iTunes Match [1], a service that is separate from Apple Music. It is something like $25 a year and does more or less what you're asking for here, especially in conjunction with Apple Music.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146

Apple compared the M1 Max to a 3080m. 4x the GPU cores and up to 8x the memory makes a difference, and it wouldn't be at all surprising to see that their numbers are accurate.

Really? The M1 is a bit slower than a 1650, so 4x that performance gets you solidly into 3000 series range. There might be a handful of PC laptops that can outpace the M1 Max, but none in remotely comparable a package.

Chromium browsers support and enable by default the "ping" attribute. This helpfully makes link tracking a standard bit of functionality, rather than needing ugly workarounds to accomplish the same thing.

Two separate things at play here. Parent is saying they trust Apple to manage their payment options, and since third parties have to go through Apple they don't have to trust a bunch of individual companies to do things right.

Apple Pay is one of those payment options, but if you have to trust a bunch of third parties to properly manage your information the specific form of payment doesn't matter much.

It isn't bad to investigate or ask questions; the problem is that many of the people who are vocal proponents of the lab-leak theory are making a motte and bailey argument that takes the form of "the virus escaped from a lab in China" as the motte and "China deliberately released the virus to hurt its enemies/Trump/etc" as the bailey. I don't have a strong opinion on the origin of the virus, but the idea that China released it deliberately is very stupid and where most of the lab-leak conversations I've followed end up.

It also doesn't help that China's current leadership is extremely allergic to anything that implicates China at all, so their actions are largely compatible with what you'd see in a coverup.

"I need this specific platform to succeed for some reason" does not somehow make that platform a monopoly that should be subject to regulatory action.

Apple's management of their platform is not unique, is not meaningfully different from their competitors, and not meaningfully different from the management of similar stores in different industries. Even assuming they actually have built a strong enough brand that people are judged for having a competing product, I fail to see how requiring changes to the App Store solves that problem.

What alternative did he have? The president's hand-picked AG had released an extremely misleading "summary" of Mueller's findings, which the president was using to claim total exoneration.

Trump's supporters would have taken any action beyond cowed silence as evidence of a "politically motivated attack," because that's been the president's messaging. The investigation itself was characterized as "politically motivated messaging," despite having been started under Trump by Trump appointees.

Mueller isn't responsible for "widening the divide," and there was nothing he could do to heal it while living up to his mandate. The president, or at least the president's team, did a lot of illegal things during the election. You don't meaningfully hold them to account or heal "the divide" by falsely exonerating the president.

Mueller went out of his way to say that his investigation did not exonerate Trump, and realistically the only reason more people did not go to jail (and a lot of people went to jail, including one of Trump's campaign managers) is because key players were successful in obstructing justice.

Like, you can be skeptical of the idea that the Russian interference was decisive in the election without dismissing the very real lawbreaking that happened.

First three things are on point, but we tried the last one. The "Paycheck Protection Program" that immediately ran out of money was our attempt to do something similar.

In a perfect world, a much larger PPP would have been more efficient and easier to manage than expanded unemployment benefits; in world we live in, that would have meant trusting an administration that prides itself on incompetence and corruption to handle what would have been the bulk of our economic response.

Exclusions from a bug bounty are a part of the game, but if something is excluded, you—as the entity excluding it—can't reasonably demand secrecy re: an out of scope bug. You either accept that you're going to eat a reputational hit (and likely be forced to fix the exploit anyway) or make an exception to your policy.

If Valve wanted to try and defend the structure of their bug bounty program by essentially arguing that Steam is such a mess that local privilege escalations are out of bounds, they should be forced to publicly reckon with that stance.

I don't know how many people care about the ban, per se, but Valve's strategy here is an extremely bad and pointless one.

Was Valve technically within their rights to ban this researcher? Sure. Was it a move that advanced Valve's interests in any way? Obviously not.

1 is explained in his previous article: he doesn't want to be the arbiter of what is blocked and what is permissible

2 he addresses in the linked piece: which charity?

3: he tried this already with The Magazine and learned that he does not like those challenges

4: this is a bad solution and I'm assuming you offered it as a joke

If you frequently replace devices, maybe. If you're one of those poor suckers that bought Verizon's version of the Galaxy Nexus, you know that the promise of consistent updates for eighteen months is inadequate.

From the article, it sounds like they only need to open the text message: they don't need to actually play the video, even in the stock MMS app.

In my experience, people will open a message just to clear the notification and that's all that it would take for them to be compromised.