The unibomber was an anarchist, therefore anarchists are bad, you don't see how that works? It's like how environmentalism is bad because of eco-terrorism and encryption is bad because Mark Zuckerberg is a jerk who has too much money and all Muslims are bad because of 9/11.
Right but he basically asserted to everyone that a socialist revolution is coming to wipe them out. Is there something I don’t know? Should I be getting ready for this?
Huh? It was a joke. Explaining the joke will kill it, but here goes: He was saying that their OCaml skills would still be useful even if they couldn't make money in finance because capitalism fell over. The audience got the joke and laughed. It's nothing like what you're saying.
What I saw was this guy flatly asserting that a socialist revolution is coming, I thought at first he was talking about Bernie Sanders, and where there should be a punchline there is no punchline. Then everyone gives an awkward and half-cocked chuckle as one does when presented with something so bizarre.
Actually the “flu bro” crowd has some really good points. For me, it’s impossible to ignore the inconsistency. Imagine tens of thousands of people standing before you before they perish gruesomely. These people who died of preventable things other than covid 19, are ignored by society — nobody cares. You aren’t considered a murderer for going to work with the flu (but you technically are) and you aren’t considered irresponsible for taking your kids on unnecessary car rides. When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.
I think hospitals should maintain enough capacity to handle influx. I think that people should wear masks and wash their hands. But none of that changes what I wrote above. And it doesn’t change the fact that many, many people have a fetish for doom. It’s the same with global warming or the second coming of Christ — a kernel of truth or good intention becomes a mass fetish for doom and no reasonable discourse can survive.
I’m talking about the death toll at the end of the day, not the current death toll. I’m talking about the likely maximum number to ever be infected (roughly herd immunity number) multiplied by the percentage of people that the virus kills. I understand exponential growth. People who have their own opinions are not necessarily suffering from a lack of math knowledge.
And if we follow your premise that this is hysteria and we go back to work how many absolute numbers of people will die vs other causes of preventable death?
Herd immunity would still mean millions of dead people you'd have to step over.
The countries that thought they could go this route did a hard reverse once reality hit them.
You're comparing millions of death in the US to the world population. It would be more fair to either use the expected number of deaths worldwide if we just continued our business, or compare it to the total population of the US.
My friend, take the number of people who end up dying after herd immunity and compare it to the population that it infected. If it’s more than a drop in the proverbial bucket, then please excuse me.
I see there's no use in arguing, as the same pointless statement gets parroted back each time.
This disease is now the #1 cause of death in America. Nothing like a trifling total; nothing like a drop; nothing like an ignorable fraction. Very, very significant.
Unless and until 2008guy offers up his extended network of friends and family to be consumed by the disease, I think it's safe to assume moral reasoning isn't his/her forte.
This appeared to cross some threshold where it really scared people. Personally, the flu scared me. Motor vehicle deaths and hospital acquired infections also terrified me. Those were already above my personal threshold where I thought the risk was pretty bad. I would already maintain a wide berth around anyone coughing or visibly sick.
There's also some paranoia because this is new, and because of the fear of asymptomatic carriers. That makes people think they're helpless and have no way of protecting themselves. A loss of control is an important factor in creating terror.
That being said, this virus does truly appear worse. Wherever that fear threshold is for people, this virus has crossed it.
It is worse for sure. I was stuck in a hotel for the past two months so all I did was watch cnn. It was amazing to see the sentiment of the language on cnn actually become politically neutral as the disease spread in the US. That was when i really knew that this is something big. Anderson cooper actually defended Donald trump in a minor but explicit way at one point and I thought I was dreaming. The people at cnn were definitely scared for a little while there.
How much intensive care capacity do you think is available? And how much intensive care load would unmitigated covid-19 progression consume? The (wild) disparity between these numbers is the entirety of current crisis, but you seem to treat it as just another factor.
I’m not even sure if this would parse as legitimate English. What?
And in response to your other recent comment, my entire family has been “consumed” (you idiot) by one disease or another. I am the only one left. Nobody was hysteric when they died. People were apathetic. It’s difficult to sympathize with people’s hysteria when just a month ago they were apathetic in the face of countless lives lost to other preventable diseases even though there were easy prevention methods available. Difficult to sympathize with the hysteric mob when a month ago I watched them stream from the back doors of bars, staggering into their vehicles and driving off - the same drive of stupidity that fuels the hysteria and apparently your comments.
What negates this thinking is hard mathematics ie that all the other things don't kill at a _geometric_ rate. If left unchecked millions of people will die in a short amount of time.
Yes flu also progress similarly but we have vaccines for the flu and we manage it seasonally. Even considering the CFR for covid-19 will drop substantially it is still killing by OOM more people across all age brackets without co-morbidities (not to mention medics) which the flu doesn't do.
> When you look at the amount of death caused by unremarkable things and the amount of death caused by covid 19, they are the same. Compared to 7 billion, they are basically the same in that they are a drop in the bucket. After covid 19, will we care about all the people dying from other preventable things? No. Because this is hysteria. It’s not logic.
Should we be lucky enough for Covid-19 to have the same disease burden as the worst flu season as of late, and not the disease burden it's actually projected to have, several orders of magnitude more people will die than they would from the flu. So no, compared to 7 billion, they are not basically the same.
Your "really good points" hinge on a shaky understanding of statistics at best, or just outright ignoring the available data at worst.
Nope. I spent the last year looking to do this and it’s not as simple as you say. If you buy a plot in the middle of Arizona or something, you might be responsible for road upkeep or charged for other things. And you still have to pay taxes every year as well as follow building codes. And there are hidden problems. You have no privacy, you will be in a wash and get flooded, you will probably get robbed, an industrial farm might move in nearby and spray fecal matter upwind of you. You’ll need an off-road vehicle just to get there and you’re going to have to off-road truck all your building supplies to the site. Oh and you want water? Good luck. And you have to pay tens of thousands at least to get the land. By the end, it’s not even close to being cost effective. Back in the day you could buy land in Texas with no zoning or building codes and get a huge area for almost no money. That just doesn’t exist anymore.
And plus, you are at the mercy of the county. If they want to raise taxes or make your life hell with some kind of development like a highway or something, it’s them vs little old you. And guess who’s gonna win. Oh and if you have a small medical problem you are 100% dead.
If you want to get out of the rat race, you should move to a midwestern city. You can find houses for less than 50k in safe neighborhoods by California standards. For 50k you get low property taxes, decent neighborhood, reliable internet, nearby hospital, Costco, cheap gas and cheap electricity. And plus, when the county wants to fuck people over with taxes or developments, they have to deal with half a million angry people rather than just you. That’s crucially important. I’ve been researching this intensely for a year and casually for almost a decade.
And you can live cheaper than you think. If you live in your house and aren’t selling in the next two years, you can perform almost any alteration to your house yourself. You don’t have to hire an electrician or plumber as long as you pull permits yourself and follow code. You could build a whole house yourself in most places — just need an engineer to draw plans. People have no clue about this, they just assume you have to pay thousands to do anything. You can live quite well outside the rat race if you are smart.
I hope you have been saving because the next 6 months will probably be the best time to do this in the last decade. I bought a cheap house just like this a month ago and while I still paid very little, I am kicking myself.
Would you be willing to share which states you've considered?I've been looking into this myself, and although cost is not the only factor I'm considering, I find it's intertwined with other social factors.
I’ve visited almost every state at least briefly. In the past couple months I visited El Paso, New Orleans, Huntsville, Lincoln and Omaha, Wichita and Des Moines. Des Moines was the best by a mile.
There was a throwaway comment about that at a press conference and lots of rumors (positive and negative), but the white paper only mentions “monkey” once—-and in a reference to another group’s paper.
Elon musk said on stage that they had put it in a monkey and had the monkey move a cursor with it. I’ve been following musk very closely since 2010 and he’s never blatantly lied so I think this will not be the first time. He has made errors about timelines and etc but never, ever blatantly lied about something so concrete. And it’s plausible to boot.
Not to swing my credentials around, but I actually record neural activity, from monkey brains, for a living.
It can be unexpectedly hard in so many different ways. The dura covering the monkey brain is much tougher, the brain itself is larger, more convoluted, and moves more, even just from breathing and heartbeats). The animals have busy, clever little fingers, so the interface itself needs to be mechanically robust and durable because these implants need to last for years.
I certainly want this to be true: with the exception of neuropixels, electrode technology has been depressingly stagnant. On the other hand, I need to see data before I get too excited and if I did have it, I'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
> One engineering challenge is that the brain's chemical environment can cause many plastics to gradually deteriorate. Another challenge to chronic electrode implants is the inflammatory reaction to brain implants. Transmission of chemical messengers via neurons is impeded by a barrier-forming glial scar that occurs within weeks after insertion followed by progressive neurodegeneration, attenuating signal sensitivity. Furthermore, the thin electrodes which Neuralink uses, are more likely to break than thicker electrodes, and currently cannot be removed when broken or when rendered useless after glial scar forming.
The inflammation and damage is seen in traditional arrays that are large and rigid. A thread with low enough moment of inertia will likely not cause as much damage. And the damage is only important if you put the electrodes in an important place... we currently screw two giant lag screws into people’s heads and call it “deep brain stimulation” so I feel optimistic about the long game. But you’d still be right to be wary. And if I had it my way, this technology would never be allowed to exist at all...
It's a social crisis waiting to happen, especially if you can end up decoding more than just what someone uses their speech centers to articulate.
This is invasive to the extreme, and seems to open the door for violations of people's intimate thoughts down the road.
You may not think about it much now, but if you pay any attention to things like intrusive thoughts, or even have to deal with carefully maintaining a public face in the workplace, it should not be difficult to realize why these technologies are legitimately dangerous even as read only systems.
The real nightmare begins when you finally get fed up with Read-Only and figure out how to write in order to potentially mutate mental state.
I'm normally pretty forward-thinking in terms of embracing the March of technological progress. However, the last decade or so has shown we as a society have had our grasp exceed our socio/ethical/moral framework for using it responsibly; and the potential abuse a full read/write neural interface would enable is one of the few things that has managed to attain a "full-stop" in my personal socio-ethical-moral framework.
Not to sound like that an adult, but we're just not ready.
Before anyone points out that the same moral outrage probably occurred with the printing press; there is a big damn difference between changing someone's mind through pamphlets, and having a direct link to the limbic system to tickle on a whim. We do a very bad job of correctly estimating the long-term effects of technological advancement; just look at how destructive targeted advertising has been.
I haven't reached my conclusion on an existing preconception/predisposition either. I used to be massively for this particular advancement. Only through a long time spent reflecting on it has my viewpoint done a 180.
I'm aware of all of the positive applications for the handicap, brain-locked, and paralyzed; but I'm still reluctant to consider embracing it for their sake when I've seen how prone to taking a crowbar to a minor exception/precedent our legal system is.
Maybe I've just been in the industry long enough not to trust tech people to keep society's overall well-being and stability at heart. Maybe I'm becoming a luddic coward as I get older. I don't know, and I ask myself if I'm not being unreasonable every day. The answer hasn't changed though in a long while, even though I do keep trying to seek out opportunities to challenge it.
I hope that helps, and doesn't make me sound like too much of a nut.
> Before anyone points out that the same moral outrage probably occurred with the printing press; there is a big damn difference between changing someone's mind through pamphlets, and having a direct link to the limbic system to tickle on a whim.
I've recently read a short story from Ted Chiang likened the development of writing to a fundamental cybernetic enhancement of the brain. I found it to be quite enlightening, as I never thought of how writing changes how we see ourselves and the environment. Our memories are imperfect and inaccurate and amplify biases we have, while writing loses much less information.
> just look at how destructive targeted advertising has been
Can you elaborate? Targeted advertising doesn't even make my top 100 of destructive technologies.
Instead of thinking of advertising as "technology" you might want to look into the military-esque research that brought it into the free market. Just like the internet, psyops was first destructed and formalized by people that value information over influence. As only one will beget the other with any statistical certainty.
Targeted advertising in my lifetime has gone from staging ads for kitchen appliances on daytime TV channels or in magazines for housewives to a bunch of friends getting together with their cell phones, talking about a one off odd topic, and then finding ads pop up on that topic in the next week.
To clarify: we've gone from general audience profiling, to employment of broadband sensors for surreptitious collection of data from which to make ad serving decisions. There also exist patents for installing microphones for responding to user's screaming a brand name at a TV to skip a commercial, and the practice of frame sampling of viewed content from SmartTV's. These intrusions into personal privacy come purely for the benefit of forwarding the interests of these ad servers, which also creates a vulnerability in terms of the fact that your digital footprint is available to anyone else interested in paying or requesting to be able to use it. You can't have that granular ad targeting without implementation of further surveillance capabilities.
Furthermore, there are additional consequences in that filter bubbles are created. Without you being aware, the advertising industry by default will attempt to skew your overall experience toward what they think you want to see rather than what is actually out there, or what you ask for. These algorithms allowed to run unchecked, without instilling an innoculative knowledge of the tendency of these systems to shepherd one right off the reservation given enough time, leads to things where we throw around phrases likening our society to being "post-truth", and have actually recorded multiple instances of widespread population level sentiment engineering.
So we"e garbage binned any semblance of common worldview, and invited Orwellian tiers of data collection into our lives so that other people can stand a chance at maybe serving us an ad we weren't even actively looking for in the hopes of modifying our behavvior to make a purchase happen so that they can generate revenue off of our eyeballs and content creation.
Make no mistake. Targeted advertising is a blight. It's one of those things that sounds reasonable, innocent, and possibly even helpful on the surface; but quickly sours once you start digging into the details that make it happen.
I understand some people may feel they get value out of such an arrangement; that having that ad pop up at that time genuinely makes their life easier. I ask the followi ng, however: has an ad ever taught you anything that dedicated research, and purposeful exercise of your will to purchase couldn't teach you? Has your experience searching and trying to share information online not been adversely effected in that all people's searches of the same terms have no real consistent base anymore? The answer for me in both cases is "no". Throw in the fact that if I don't regularly clean out every last trace of client side state, my wanderings through cyberspace are painstakingly mapped and integrated by an industry hell bent on coaxing Every last shred of potential value out of my mere existence with no regard for the dangers of accumulating all that data in one place.
Nowadays, you have rumblings that we should be using these technical solutions as the basis of social/political policy, and half the people making the assertion one way aren't looking at the whole picture.
I don't want the world to time-freeze at early 2000's technology by a long shot. Let me be clear on that. I do however, believe we need to seriously take a look at our capabilities, and work on creating a cohesive, widespread set of ethic/moral dicta that jive with what we purport our most valued cultural aspects are as a society. Yes, I understand that may mean converging to things I don't agree with; and that's fine. I just want as many people as possible to have the whole picture; and I don't think that right now that is actually the case.
Also, see the information warfare post from a sibling poster. Information, and tactically imposed voids of information are just as weaponizable as any object. Over longer timescales, no doubt. Still viable though.
The human brain doesn’t change on a human timescale. Where there is variability there is natural selection. Do you think the world will select for friendliness?
The limiting factor here isn't implant technology. The limiting factor is the rate we can implant electrodes and do new science.
Don't get me wrong, I love Elon as much as the next fanboy but there are serious ethical implications at play here that you can't just engineer your way around.
What Neuralink has done so far is pretty impressive, but I think "decades" is still a pretty reasonable estimate for when that technology will be available for use cases that aren't medically necessary.
The answer seems so obvious. Do a hard, air tight quarantine of people of advanced age. People who are borderline or sick are told to stay inside. Encourage the rest of society to go about business as usual. Provide government support for all of it. Some people will die but probably less than if we have to do this over and over again without ever gaining herd immunity. And few enough to massively ease the burden on hospitals. And it’s the best way to avoid Great Depression 2020.
Those most at risk are those requiring care. An 80+ person with some illness with typical assistance at home might meet 20+ working age people in a week. That can probably be scaled down in the name of caution to say 5, but it's unlikely to be the same 5 every week because of staff turnover, illness.
It's the same whether you receive care at home or in an assisted living facility.
Even without such care, a lot of these people regularly need hospital care for things that aren't covid. Many have regular scheduled visits to doctors for blood pressure medication tweaks and similar. You could isolate the healthy 70 year olds quite well, but not the sick 80 year olds.
Prove that what matters? That they meet tons of working age people?
As you say you can expand the circle of isolation. All the at-risk patients (Say people over 65 and all adults with preexisting conditions). Then you isolate those people that they have to interact with. For example all staff at all nursing homes where any such person lives. But you quickly end up where you started. All the people who work in all the nursing homes have kids and spouses. They can't see those people when they aren't working, and then return to work with the risk group. They'd need to take their kids out of school for example (remember the point of all this is to make the rest of society work normally, schools are open). It's hard.
It's probably easier then to designate people as high risk "patients" and treat them with full protective clothing, move them to special homes where care can be given with more protection and so on. But that also requires 3 things: lots of staff, lots of protective gear, lots of time to set up. I don't think there is a surplus of any of those things. It might be something to consider for the long term.
Another data point: The following source gives additional detail on the kind of thing that is meant by "preexisting condition" when they say "people without preexisting conditions have nothing to fear". One of them is high blood pressure. Who doesn't have high blood pressure, these days.
If you just measure the total amount of debt in the world, it’s very large even historically. I read a great article about it by the world bank. It’s been obvious for years that creditors are not very discerning. I think juicero and theranos will be used as examples of how loose creditors were. Every national bank in the world has been simultaneously engaged in pushing cheap money for a decade. If this really is going to be the trigger for the collapse of all the illegitimate debt out there then this is going to be very interesting.
