> This will sound like a hot take, but consider that terrorists are for the most part, stupid idiots.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
> "one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter"
yes, but only to weak-minded cultural relativists.
I don't mind stating a definition explicitly. If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
Note: The only real complexity in the definition is that during war, embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes, and when it does, it's the ones choosing to do that, war criminals by definition, who bear the responsibility for those innocent deaths when those locations then become legitimate military targets.
I'll omit giving examples to avoid triggering those who like to "bothsides" some of the more well-known terrorist groups lately.
> If you would consider killing nonviolent civilians, merely to send a message to others or to prove yourself to your "god," you're a terrorist.
The US is a "christian" nation which has been doing this for decades, even centuries at this point. As recently as a few weeks ago and the official government seems to be pretty joyous about it. I'm pretty sure it's the same "god". Not sure who this god guy is but he seems like an asshole who can justify anything.
> embedding military equipment among civilians happens sometimes
"happens sometimes" is in the passive voice. What if you live in a war zone and the war isn't far away? Are the people stockpiling AR-15's in the US legitimate military targets? There's a fun 80's movie about Cuba invading the US that you should watch some time. Is that "pro terrorist propaganda"?
Boko Haram is not a mentally disabled person tricked by the FBI they are real terrorists who attack schools to stop children from learning. They're the epitome of stupid and backwards.
> If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
That's a great example of selection bias: if they were intelligent enough to be capable of causing harm at that scale, they would have immediately realized the new guy suggesting targets and offering to buy them explosives was an FBI agent.
I'm not admiring or excusing anyone. I'm saying you probably find a whole range of IQs among them. Because why wouldn't you? Whose to say if the userbase of this site grew up in the wrong conditions, a portion wouldn't be terrorists too?
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
(Personally, I wish researchers would not forgot quite so often that there is a non-mRNA COVID vaccine available in the US. Where's all the analysis of the effects of the Novavax vaccine?)
The myocarditis as caused by e.g. Moderna was affecting teen males and you posted a link to a blog which linked to a study about 70 year old US veterans.
If you're referring to the Mike Kwan paper, he was on (I believe, it was years ago) the Science Vs podcast to debunk claims by the likes of Malone and Rogan regarding his study.
But yes, there are instances of myocarditis from vaccines, but occurance was 4-5/100k as opposed to unvaccinated 200/100k.
Edit: in his words:
> MK: All the cases were hospitalised because we wanted to perform a detailed workup for them
> RR: So they didn't need to be there to, like, keep them alive.
> WZ: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. In fact, he said that that these these patients, they all cleared up with either painkillers[50] like ibuprofen …
> MK: Some of them even not require medications, and they just take a rest, and eventually they recover by themselves, and none of them got severe complications, and no cases of mortality, most importantly. And all of them recover and went back home. And so far, some patients are being followed up around 7 months[51] and they’re very good, no problem, so this is very good news.
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
This is the gospel that is taught. It seems to help people tolerate the fruits of their labor being quietly separated from them over time. Just another tax, except the people have even less of a say in this one.
Can you provide counter arguments to mine, though? It does not reduce wealth if dealt with correctly as an individual. It is meant to incentivize investments rather than hoarding, i.e., doing nothing with your money, as I explained.
> They're not. They're not particularly effective for preventing flu in an individual. But at the group level, they have a clear and useful effect.
This is my understanding. It basically would have marginally reduced the cost of the flu coming through, right? But thats not the impression that I would get from any of the discussion here. Am I wrong?
Parent poster is saying that even though the effect on an individual is low relative to other vaccines, the effect of a whole group taking the vaccine is actually very high.
This the opposite of your understanding. The benefit to the individuals in a group from the whole group taking the vaccine is actually much larger than the benefit to an individual in the group of taking the vaccine solo.
> Combined with the brutal arithmetic at higher R0R_0
R0 , this is a large part of why flu vaccination programs are generally justified on individual protection against illness and severe outcomes rather than on a realistic expectation of achieving herd immunity and stopping circulation.
On the one hand, in a military setting you can feasibly achieve 100% compliance. But if you don't stop transmission (which it sounds like we don't have good data saying it would), you don't get herd immunity.
So I think you're back to just the benefits of reduction in disease, which is not nothing, but it is marginal like I said originally.
I mean, I would say that preventing 40% of disease (depending on what you're measuring, etc etc) is not marginal. I guess I'd turn it around and ask, if 40% is marginal, what number would not be marginal, and why do you draw the line there?
(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)
The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.
The relevant question for me would be how many people would be combat ineffective for how long with and without the flu vaccine. Your Claude conversation says things like this:
"The best recent direct measurement is the FLUTES study (JAMA Network Open, 2024), which tracked secondary infections after flu entered US households across 2017–2020. The result: the estimated effectiveness of influenza vaccines for preventing secondary infections among household contacts was 21.0% (95% CI, 1.4% to 36.7%). Note how wide that confidence interval is — the lower bound is nearly zero."
And
"This is consistent with older household work. A 2013 study found no evidence that vaccination prevented household transmission once influenza was introduced; adults were at particular risk despite vaccination — strikingly, 9 of 11 adults with household-acquired influenza were vaccinated in that sample."
So most people on base who were going to get infected and transmit are still going to do so. Some portion of them have a better time with the illness if it does come around, which won't happen all the time. Contrast that with the costs of the program (side effects, time, whatever cons you can think of), and it seems like you might not be in slam dunk territory.
> I can control government more than I can control Google or Anthropic
How true is this really? With the government, you can vote in various elections, or contact your representatives, and when it comes to important issues that will do exactly squat. You can also buy politicians or legislation, or run yourself, if you have the wealth and connections to do so.
With corporations, you can vote with your dollars, which again on important issues will probably do squat. Or you can try to get hired and change the company from within. Or if you have the wealth, you can buy the company (partially or wholly), or start a competitor and win in the marketplace.
In both situations there are options, and most of them are basically impossible for the small folk.
The illusion of control is stronger with modern democratic governments-but while it’s true that if we all voted for Vermin Supreme, he’d rule, it’s also true if we all stopped using Google they’d die quickly.
But neither is a realistic outcome. And neither do you personally have anything remotely near “control”. The reason everyone argues about this stuff online is that’s literally the only power we have.
However, the same effort and energy spent elsewhere can reap much, much bigger dividends down the line.
1 small guy changing stuff is basically impossible. But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation (they're not the customer, they don't have enough buying power for a hostile takeover, they certainly don't have the wherewithal to destroy them by launching a competitor... which they probably don't even want to if they think what the corporation does is bad). The exception, of course, is that if the corporation bothers that many small people that much, a government might get around to listening to the small people's arguments more than the corporation's.
> But 100 million small folk sufficiently annoyed with something changes a government (for better and for worse), whilst having basically zero influence over a corporation
They don't have influence because you designed them to be so. You said they're not the customer and implied they have no influence over customers.
Your argument says 100 million small folk in the same government jurisdiction have more government say vs 100 million small folk have in a company they have nothing to do with. That seems clear.
The inverse relation could also be said though. 100 million small folk in different government jurisdictions have less say in a government they have nothing to do with than 100 million customers of the same company do with a corporation.
Things other governments do generally don't affect me as things other companies in the same market as me get away with doing, or things a company does in my neighbourhood though, and there are a lot more companies with power to hurt my interests than countries. Also there's the little thing called foreign policy that means 100 million people do, in fact, get to vote on how their government handles things other governments do which hurt them, to the extent their government has negotiation cards to play.
On the other hand pure market solutions mean "if you're not the customer, corporations can harm you and 100 million other people interests in their locality as much as they like".
The limitations of 100 million people's ability to stop the 10 million people across the border voting for something that will harm them come because international relations look less like a democracy and more like a market...
The President of the United States visibly hates me and keeps calling me a "Dumocrat". If Sundar Pichai did that, he'd be fired, and even people who despise my politics would generally understand why companies don't let their CEOs say such things.
But Congress won't fire Trump. All of my representatives would, if given a chance, but other representatives in other districts have no accountability to me and don't want to.
So I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that I have less practical control over the federal government than I do Google, even if the formal levers of power are meant to achieve a different result.
Are you saying this because you only recognize the name from breathless covid propaganda? Or because you know ivermectin is pretty important in livestock management.
Both! I think it would be unfortunate if a valuable deworming drug was difficult to access in an acute worm crisis because it had became unexpectedly politically salient from an crisis that did not involve worms.
This seems like a poor tool to keep in your logical toolbox. If some line of logic would lead to some sacred cow getting slaughtered, then that logic must be false?
I do wonder if either the interviewer or interviewee are aware how insane this must sound to people with regular jobs. They did mention something about feeling privileged, but it feels like they don't necessarily understand what that actually means.
Realistically, you hit the lottery and had (still have?) it better than most. I'm not at faang, but I do pretty well at a tech company myself, and I've never thought of any of it as permanent, and I arrange my life accordingly.
What even is a terrorist?
If your definition of terrorist is "person on the news involved in some FBI entrapment scheme", then yeah they're probably not that bright.
But more generally, terrorists are probably pretty hard to define (one persons terrorist is another persons freedom fighter, etc), and I would imagine include a whole range of intellectual capacities.
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