md_

Well, it does reduce spread, right?

That said,

> Join the feedlot if you want but I will not, I have been doing just fine as my own master, I need not the yoke of protection, certainly not from the feds.

One of the other motivations policymakers have in promoting vaccination is that in many places hospital capacity is dangerously reduced due to the influx of covid cases.

The mRNA vaccines do appear to reduce risk (of infection and of symptoms) in recovered patients as well. (See e.g. https://theconversation.com/if-ive-already-had-covid-do-i-ne...)

That said, the German "geimpft, getestet, oder genesen" strategy ("vaccinated, tested, or recovered") is explicitly what you suggest.

The tradeoff here, to me, is that:

- If we do not mandate vaccination, people can preserve their individual autonomy and will, nonetheless, probably get infected sooner or later and thus have some immunity. (According to some research, greater than that of vaccinated people against the same strain, but perhaps reduced against other strains.)

- However, that relies upon maintaining sufficient hospital capacity for the additional cases with severe symptoms. So as long as hospital capacity remains an issue, mandatory vaccinations make sense.

In all three countries, the pushback is primarily from populist/right-wing political movements. This is not a strictly American phenomenon.

The reality is just that it's complicated and multifaceted.

At the end of the picnic Bill comes out to answer questions. Some eager young intern raises their hand and asks, "Mr. Gates: What qualities are most important to success?"

Bill laughed a little bit and said, "Well, it helps to be smart."

Like, what about that DTC toothbrush company? Or those guys who sell disposable razors? Or the online viagra salesmen whose ads are all over the MTA? Somehow, investors have become convinced these are tech companies ("democratizing access to consumer goods?") that should be valued at whacky p/e ratios, instead of yet another online commodity retailer.

The question is, are more of them rich from salary, from capital ownership, or from inherited wealth?

In the US, the broad “rich”—about the top 1% by income—overwhelmingly make their income from salaries and wages (https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/09/where-the-rich-make-their-in...). However, the ultrarich—say, the top 0.1%—tend to make it from capital and inheritance.

Assuming financial gurus are trying to give feasible advice for how to become comfortably rich, the safest bet with the highest expected value is probably something like “get an elite professional education and find a spot in the elite managerial/professional class.” I.e., banker, MBA, corporate lawyer, or (for all the HN readers) FAANG engineer.

It's not a methodological issue. (The methodology itself, of course, has potential issues as well, e.g. as with the "luxury car" categorization.) It's foundational: can you really say, in a culture-independent way, that "higher socioeconomic class translates to more antisocial behavior?" Not without big caveats.

I subscribe to the New Yorker. Every week I open it on Monday and I probably read about half of it by Sunday. I live in Europe, so I'm keenly aware of when the weekly issue comes out. (Due to timezone differences, it's typically not available in the app until Monday afternoon, so I start reading over afternoon coffee, not morning coffee.)

Every few weeks, within minutes or hours of a good 20-page article coming out--an article that will take me the week to digest--I see it posted on HN.

And of course, all the top commenters have strong, strong opinions on it.

Guess they're all just faster readers than I am.

That's a Bad Thing, for sure. But I suspect most of Assange's fans aren't upset about the treatment of Assange because they oppose the carceral state; it's because they're fans of Assange.

In other words, if you say "I'm opposed to the conditions of Assange's detention", I suspect you're not saying you oppose the normal conditions of legal detention--which perhaps you should--but, rather, that you are opposed to the fact that those norms we happily apply to millions are being applied to Assange.

You can say that the rise of the Nazis was due to flaws in the Weimar political system and weaknesses in social institutions at that time, but you can also make sure people know the names of Eichmann and Heydrich and similar.

"The US" is not a monolith. Guantanamo--both the rapid expansion and ingestion of likely-innocent bystanders and the torture program--was an effort of the Bush-era Defense Department, specifically with high-level support from Donald Rumsfeld and legal cover from the Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo).

The Assange extradition was a project of the Obama-era Justice Department. It's hard to see any commonalities (in terms of goals or decision-making) at the implementation level, and whatever else you think of Assange, the US's extradition requests have, essentially, followed both international norms and American and international law.

You can try to see some sort of historical through-line here about American imperialism (and you might be right), but, as with my above analogy, that's like saying "the Star of David analogy is pertinent because it relates to the abuse of government power." At a sufficient abstraction that's true, but it still doesn't shed a lot of light.

This also contains this amusing aside: "He also criticized Obama’s healthcare policy – a 'shit sandwich' – and his administration’s approach to global warming. Mitchell believes it’s a myth."

Irony upon ironies: "Mitchell, who is retired and lives in Land o' Lakes, Florida, spends his free time kayaking, rafting and climbing.[14] He describes himself as an atheist and a supporter of Amnesty International.[10]"

Guantanamo detainees were tortured with stress positions, sexual abuse (including simulated rape), simulated executions (including being taken out to sea and told they would be thrown overboard), held in cold rooms, and told their family members would be arrested and put in prison.

This includes detainees who were later exonerated.

In comparison, Assange has been...in British custody pending the results of an extradition hearing? While contesting credible (be they right or wrong) charges of rape?

There's something deeply unjust in making this a discussion about Assange.

1. CSAM production may be incentivized by consumers (either because they pay for it or because they serve to encourage the producers).

2. CSAM may (as, famously, with Backpage) be an advertisement for real-world meet ups and further abuse.

3. Having pictures of one’s own abuse further disseminated is itself abusive and morally wrong.

Obviously producers should also be prosecuted, but while I do think the American approach is in many ways informed by puritanical beliefs, there are perfectly rational reasons to pursue the spread of such material.

Having that “emergency fund” be invested in the market means you will have “buy high/sell low” events.

For sure some people can afford this and just like to live dangerously, of course.

Yes, but banks aren't just turning around and investing deposits in the S&P 500. Right now, the marginal reserve requirement in the US is 10%. So the bank is keeping 10% of your deposit as cash.

This is pretty similar from the common advice to "keep 3 months' living expenses as an emergency fund." And thinking about that advice, I have to question the value of Financial Choice:

* If I'm a user with a reasonably high net worth--say, 10x my 3-month living expenses--I should probably just put the 3-month expenses into an FDIC-insured bank account and put the other 90% of my assets into a low-cost mutual fund or ETF.

* If I'm a user without 10x my 3-month living expenses, I definitely shouldn't be investing my emergency fund in speculative assets like equities!

So, like, who is this for? :)

Edit: Reading some of the other comments here, I get the impression there are some posters here in my first category who would like their 3-month living expenses to also be invested in equities. And yeah, if you are relatively high-net-worth-relative-to-expenses, you can risk it--someone in the "10x" category can suffer a 40% market downturn and still have a meaningful emergency fund.

On the flip side, consider that market downturns and the need to tap the emergency fund are not statistically independent; the emergency fund exists, in part, to avoid forcing you to reduce your market position to cover expenses when you lose your job in a downturn!

Unfortunately, the reality with online devices is that:

a) They are sufficiently complex that they have an indeterminate (and effectively unending) supply of vulnerabilities

b) Effective vulnerability management requires vendor support

c) The market favors one-time ("sale") models, not ongoing ("subscription") models

As a result, vendors support devices for a fixed amount of time, often subject to arbitrary constraints (like going out of business or unexpectedly high costs of fixes).

From a consumer perspective, this usually manifests as computing devices getting worse over time--less performant, less secure, and surprising and arbitrary end-of-lifing.

You might argue that a more open device ecosystem allows open source contributors to fix vulnerabilities. This is true, to a degree, but only to a degree--just as (past some point) it isn't worth it for a vendor to keep patching a long-obsolete product with a tiny userbase, it's similarly true that an esoteric open source product won't attract a robust community that can meaningfully support it.

While free software advocates like to say "But at least it would be up to me to patch it," in practice, for most users (who aren't going to write their own patches, or hire a team of professionals to do so!), predictability, transparency, and fairness are the critical components in the products they use, not "openness" per se.

For sure. :) My point was only that there's a weirdly fine line between asking readers to be critical--which I think is valid--and the crank-laden calls to "do your own research."

Real people who are actually engaged in the business of participating in society--holding down jobs, going to school, being citizens--don't have the time to effectively "research" every important issue, and, as a corollary, those who do tend to be cranks.

For sure nobody should engage in "uncritical acceptance", though to me this seems like a straw man. The test of a good newspaper isn't whether you can read it uncritically, but whether reading it critically leaves you more or less well informed.

* A distinctive phraseology which, as detailed in "Pale Horse Rider" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OQS4DYQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...), goes back to at least William Cooper and the 1990s, but has recently come to be used for things like vaccine skepticism and QAnon.

It seems to me, on its face, that this argument is laughable. The entire premise of concerns about disinfo is that disinfo is (by definition) deliberately deceptive, typically--as in the cases mentioned in the article--deceptive in posture (claiming to be opinion rather than paid propaganda) and origin (claiming to be from organic sources, like real voters, rather than sock-puppets controlled by political actors).

This criticism is, of course, not applicable to paid advertisements that disclose their source.