California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
Most people find European cities more beautiful. SC is an ugly city. Even SF is much more pretty.
> ecological
It’s pretty well established that cities are ecological superior to suburbs.
> socioeconomic
Money extracted from the economy by landlords is money not flowing and being used to spur economic activity. VC firms have lamented that they have to invest in bigger rounds because growing headcount in expensive-rent cities is their greatest expense.
People don't choose to live in cities like Santa Cruz for the architecture. That's kind of missing the point. No one cares what the buildings look like.
Noted VC Peter Thiel reduced his investments in the SF Bay Area because housing got too expensive. Most of the funding just flows to landlords.
You are effectively just proposing an enormous tax (read: price increase) on renters, which seems like the exact opposite of what needs to be achieved. I would support completely repealing prop 13 though.
Demonizing landlords, developers, and property investment firms at best does nothing and at worst actively makes the housing situation worse by further restricting supply. No amount of disincentives to property ownership will solve the core, fundamental problem that _there is not enough housing_. Any solution that doesn't increase supply is no solution at all.
a lotta yall still dont get it. ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape. so if you have 1 astro ape and 3 slurp juices you can create 3 new apes. tonight's slurp juice mint event is essentially a minting event for both Lab Monkes and Special Forces.
We might have lost the ability to solve problems and create solutions with approachable yet powerful programming environments. But think about all the abstractions, frameworks, platforms, paradigms, and design patterns we now get to learn!
We've got to learn that this is an inevitable consequence of our appetite for automation and scale.
If your business is important enough that it can't risk falling into the endless hellpit of automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure, then don't build your business on automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure.
If anything, it's the middle aged who refuse to believe that technology and music can just sort of stop progressing, while the young are downloading old music and shrugging about all the the tech hype surrounding corporate stock market bubbles.
But why is the pop music industry stagnant, though?
There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever.
Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?
Long Covid is merely a small part of a broader story of chronic inflammation and how millions and millions of people are suffering from invisible autoimmune consequences of lyme disease, STDs, and long forgotten colds and flus that triggered lifelong inflammatory reactions.
It's the hidden cause of most cancer, a major driver of the obesity epidemic, and is surely subtracting more years of life from more people than the covid pandemic ever did. I'm optimistic that we'll have the diagnostic criteria and awareness in the medical field in the future where we will be able to diagnose, measure, and treat chronic autoimmune inflammation rather than debating whether or not everybody's faking it.
Disclaimer: Some people are definitely faking it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. I'm not disputing that. If we can start understanding it as chronic autoimmune inflammation, for which there can be solid diagnostic criteria, rather than as "long covid" or "chronic lyme disease" or whatever, we can separate the legitimately ill from the disability scammers.
When you talk about hopefully being able to diagnose in the future, is your view that there are large groups of people with chronic inflammation that isn't showing up in any existing inflammatory diagnostic methods like blood tests or various types of imaging?
I believe that the diagnostic methods for testing chronic inflammation can and must be improved, and that chronic inflammation deserves far more R&D investment than it currently receives.
This period is best understood as a brutal hangover from several years of market subsidized growth. We had cheap Ubers, cheap meal delivery, and free web services all paid for by a speculative bubble which is in the process of popping.
Meta can't just admit that they don't have a viable business model or their stocks will truly crash, so they have no choice but to cannibalize their remaining customers, like how phone and cable companies screw the remaining people with landline phone service and traditional cable packages.
I chose to get vaccinated and I continue to believe it was the right decision. More data may prove me wrong. We'll see, I suppose.
But research like this underscores the point that we should not be forcing or coercing vaccination. We also should not have subjected children to years of isolating and alienating lockdowns.
My In laws coerced me into getting vaccinated and honestly I regret it. We ended up with COVID more than my unvaxxed family. It's hard to forgive them or the government.
Why don't you expand on this vitriol? This guy regrets his choice and feels he was pressured to make that choice. That a valid human emotion that doesn't make them Q related at all.
I disagree, statistics demonstrated that the death number largely decreased among vaccinated.
As such to me "forcing" vaccination is legit if it saves more people than it harms, it's for the greater good.
Personally I don't want to risk my life because my neighbour is not vaccinated, but on the other hand no one is preventing my neighbour from relocating to an isolated hut on the top of a mountain and avoid any contact with anyone if he/she does not want to get vaccinated. But as long as my neighbour wants to live in a city then he must comply with the decisions of the majority of people, who, at least in my country, rushed to get vaccinated as soon as possible.
It's the same with politics: sometimes politicians are elected which I don't like, so I can either accept the decision of majority of electors and live with that, or I can move to another place. What I can't do is decide that I refuse to comply with a law because it was enacted by a government that I don't like or didn't vote.
I don't really understand this level of risk aversion. I'm probably old for hacker news, early 40s and my infection fatality rate is somewhere around 5 to 12 in 100k. I've got many hobbies and lifestyle choices that expose me to greater risk.
Even at 80 years old the risk of covid at worst is basically no different than wingsuit base jumping hard for a season. Yes of course if you can lower your 5% risk of death by all means the vaccine is worth it. Somewhere between 50 and 80 is a gray area.
I wasn't so much worried about death as I was about being crippled with long covid and having to deal with the medical system, that would probably not believe me for help.
This is true only in hindsight. The only reason you say that is because we actually kind of lucked out that COVID didn't turn out to be any deadlier, especially to younger folks. But when those decisions were made, that was not known clearly.
> What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination
Why do you feel confident in saying that? Because I still don't.
I feel like it's still unknown to me how many lives or hours off work, or side-effects were avoided by the mandated vaccines, or were not.
And similarly, I feel it is still unknown how many lives, or hours off work, or side-effects were caused by the mandated vaccines, or were not.
Personally, I can't say if the threshold for mandatory vaccination was met or not until I know these things unequivocally.
What I could get behind, is an unrelated moral argument that would simply claim that free personal choice always trumps collectivism. But this would hold even if say COVID was super deadly to everyone and the vaccine prevented it, it would still hold that in the end it is each person's choice to get vaccinated or not, even if not doing so can contribute to the spread to others or their own death from the virus.
If instead we say there is a threshold at which indivualism has to yield to collectivism, I'm not sure I know where to put that threshold, or if the one that was decided for vaccination was wrong.
"It appears that it was indeed suboptimal for people younger and healthier than myself to take it."
Maybe it was suboptimal for them, but isn't the point that when you vaccine yourself, you're not just protecting yourself, but other people? Isn't limiting the active population that's infected a way of protecting both those who are immunocompromised, but in general, lowering the probability of everyone of exposure? Even if you're protected by vaccine as an old/obese person, would you feel safe walking around in a large population of young people with raging infections?
"What I do know is that the certainty was not at the threshold which justified mandatory vaccination."
2 million people are dead. That's more than the Spanish Flu of 1918, Polio, and Smallpox outbreaks in the US combined. It's equal to the total number of flu deaths over the last 40 years combined.
And you don't think public health officials had reason to want mandatory vaccination? I thank the gods those that came before my generation had the wherewithal to ignore this kind of logic and use widespread vaccination to eradicate Smallpox from the earth.
I was born in 1971, a year after they stopped mandatory vaccinations. My wife is not from the US, and she has the smallpox "scar" from her vaccination. If the remaining samples were to get out of the lab, I have my doubts as to whether or not the world will respond the same way it did 60 years ago.
Your argument could perhaps hold water if it were centered on the Johnson & Johnson formulation.
There is no precedent for a relatively novel technology being injected into everybody in a blind panic before a great deal of testing has been performed.
It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did.
Before a great deal of testing? It went through multiple clinical phases, including a phase iii trials with over 40,000 people from April 2020 to November 2020.
By the time most people started getting it, the phase iii trials had been going for 11 months.
If there any any significant acute effects, they would have been found.
One can speculate about long term effects but one can also speculate on long term effects of natural COVID infection.
When Polio hit the US, the Salk vaccine was enthusiastically shipped out despite no long term tests either.
It’s amazing to me that people who talk in terms of risk minimization seem to simultaneously latch onto “natural” and “alternative” cures.
Natural immunity is bandied about as if there’s no risks involved and with claims or durability which are unproven.
> It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did
But so could have Covid, that's why I say this can only be said in hindsight.
Also, the smallpox vaccine was pretty novel at the time when it was mass distributed, that was the first vaccine ever to be mass distributed. You'd have only similar trials as for COVID at the time, small sample, limited time frame, etc. You couldn't have argued it any more/less safer than the mRNA ones back then.
I don't think medical interventions should be forced on people, even if they need it. I'm for personal autonomy and choice. That said, I also like truth and accuracy and well reasoned thoughts, and it's definitely true that Covid could have been much worse, that the vaccine might have no measurable side effects whatsoever long term, and that forcing it on people did save additional lives that wouldn't have otherwise. Today's posted research paper actually tells us very little more on those topics, except that we need more research on LNP's possible lingering immune effects in humans and see the extent of it and if it even replicates in humans.
Acknowledging this doesn't mean you have to support using force or coercion on people, it just means being intelligent and honest about reality, facts, what we do know, and what we don't know.
That's what I'm here to do. Some people want to claim we now know for a fact that mandated vaccines did nothing and harmed people, this simply isn't true, we don't know that for a fact one bit, we just don't really know, that's all it is. If you claim you know, you don't, you simply believe it strongly without real justification to match the strength of your belief, aka an irrational belief. If you had that justification, it would easily convince others and we would not still all be arguing about it, but the data isn't there, the understanding of the mechanisms involved isn't there. Not yet.
It should be possible to separate the two topics. Do we want as a society which strongly favors individual rights, that we can push mandates in the name of the collective even if it means coercing individuals to do things they don't want to do?
And similarly discuss, if we wanted to save lives, lower the medical cost, and limit the spread or negative impact of Covid overall on society, is it better for a maximum number of people to be vaccinated or is it not?
Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".
And I'm also happy to discuss this, even to agree with it, in hindsight, the benefits of the vaccines weren't as big as we thought when they first came around, people hoped it would end COVID, eradicate it like vaccines did for smallpox, and that hasn't happened yet. So maybe it didn't meet the threshold, but at the time it wasn't clear that it didn't, because I still remember that we didn't know how bad Covid was going to get, or how well the vaccines would help to fight against it. Thus, I still stand that, assuming this premise, that the right thing is to coerce if there is due cause that doing so will really be to the benefit of all, then at the time it could very well have played out to be the case. Why didn't we eventually stop the mandates sooner afterwards I can't say, but I'm also not sure this is the premise people assumed, I think many people assumed simply saving the most lives mattered more than a few people's resistance to wanting to take a jab in the arm. Is that just? Well it's a debate we're all still having.
> Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".
This point seems too obvious to me to even warrant defending. Obviously, there must be an especially high bar to be met before we chase people down, hold them down, and inject chemicals into them.
Well, you could argue there are no apt thresholds at which this is ever justified. That the individual always trump the collective, so individual autonomy and personal choice should never be compromised, even if it could benefit the collective to do so.
And similarly you could say the reverse, the collective should always take priority, and in all cases where even minor benefits are to be found, the collective matters most.
When I took the vaccine, it was the beginning of Delta variant, I don't remember it being known at that time that the original strain would stop circulating or what the effects of Delta would be, and especially not long COVID related symptoms. I also didn't know a less virulent strain, Omicron would come and spread and take over the others. There was also the issue of ICUs reaching their max capacity, you can't have everyone be treated for severe COVID at the same time, so you needed a lot of people vaccinated fast to relive the medical system from that load. And finally, it wasn't known that it would still allow spread, or that it wouldn't work as well from Delta and Omicron as the original variant.
When I took it as a 30 year old in very good health, I did so to protect my parents, my older coworkers, my friends that are immunocompromised, and to hope to avoid a bad time and possible long Covid symptoms. I'd already known two people who had died from COVID, one my age by obese, and one elderly. I wasn't worried of dying from COVID myself, but I still didn't want to get it, and I was worried of long term effects, still am on that.
Even now, I don't think anyone can claim a unanimous decision was better or worse, even in hindsight. The positive second order effects of vaccination are not clearly quantified, the negative effects of Covid long term are not clearly quantified, and the negative effects of the various vaccines are not clearly quantified.
The reason we're even all arguing about it is because it's very ambiguous knowing which is best, vaccination or not. If it was obvious one was a better decision we wouldn't be having all these debates of opinion.
Even though it is my opinion, I don't agree that it's morally bankrupt to think otherwise. Agreeing on values is one of the hardest things to achieve.
Some people have a collectivist leaning, others an individualist leaning (and this can depend on a per-issue basis even within the same individual).
Some people think the morally correct goal is to save as many lives as possible in the short term, while others think individual autonomy and personal choice is more important. Some are in the middle, putting the threshold slightly lower or higher in either direction.
You and me simply lean more towards favoring personal autonomy and choice, at least on this issue apparently.
Luckily, our societies have evolved diplomatic methods to solve these conflicts of values, through the democratic process and pre-agreed on laws. Instead of going to useless war or leaning on force, we put the elected officials in charge of the decision on the effective policies, and each one looked at the tradeoffs, looked at their constituency, looked at the limited data available, and made a decision.
