The article mentions performing myriad assays as a rate-limiting step in drug discovery. My employer https://www.synthace.com is trying to accelerate this process through software. We’ve created a platform to easily program liquid handling robots to perform complex protocols, and to do so using a Design-of-Experiments[1] approach to investigate multiple factors simultaneously. It’s early days for this approach but we’ve already had pharma customers using it to significantly accelerate their drug discovery process.
I use his work, but for me the situation is more complicated my prior experiences with the author.
He's been making similar complaints about his lack of renumeration for quite a while. In an older GitHub where he requested contributions, I pointed out that he had barely worked on the project for many months (at that time), and not published a new version to npm in years[1], despite making a $600 withdrawal from his Open Collective fund in June 2018 with the explicit purpose of releasing v5[2].
In the thread, I suggested that I and others might be willing to contribute, but I wanted more certainty on what exactly my contribution would be paying for. As I saw it, at that point he had a number of regular donors who were essentially paying him to do nothing.
He responded very angrily, saying nobody had any right to question his actions or to expect anything from him, even if they were paying him. He then deleted my comment entirely and banned me from commenting further. This interaction didn't exactly leave me with a strong desire to contribute. I think he's a rather volatile individual and the community would indeed be better off forking this project than indulging his sense of grievance.
You might see that as “volatile”, but I think I can see what he’s getting at. A charitable reading of his whole stance:
• We can enter into a formal contract where I actually do owe you work-on-this-project in exchange for pay;
• but without such a contract, donations to me are just that — donations — and don’t influence my work;
• but this is an open-source project, so you’re free to put whatever work you like into it, and keep/use/share the results (in your own space, that I don’t have to referee.)
• I’ll just be over here, doing what I want, unless/until someone makes a contract with me to do what they want. (Which, of course, they’re not obligated to do; they could just as well hire someone else to fork and maintain the project, rather than hiring me. That’s their choice.)
• So, in short, you’re not the boss of me; unless you’re literally my boss. (A patron is not a boss.)
Yeah, bringing money into free software equation complicates things.
It comes down to donors expecting something back for their donation, while authors expect something back for all the effort they put so far into the project that is obviously useful to other people.
For my open source project I made a hard decision not take any money. This curbs expectations and puts users at disadvantage, but lets me take as much time off as I want and I sleep better.
I've participated in a project using Bountysource some years ago; in total I received something on the order of 1500-2000 $. Which is nice. I assume a lot of people did a lot more work than I did back then and never saw any money for it. So I probably have no right to complain or lament about these transactions in any way. But, in a way, it is very hard to not think about dollar per time, especially with Bountysource being attached to solving specific issues. I believe this contributed to my mentality souring over time, because in the back of my head I never got rid of the idea that I'm sort-of at work here, but at about 2 $/hr average wage. I stopped contributing to that project completely after about just two years or so.
For most people, the funding mechanisms on the Internet pretty much all carry an expectation that they're to support ongoing work that will be used to either explicitly deliver a product, as with Kickstarter, or is to fund an artist's/coder's/etc. ongoing work. Not many people are making donations based on past effort.
I sold a (non-open source) shareware product way back when. Money definitely provided the incentive to put more work into it than I otherwise would have. On the other hand, it made me treat it as a business, albeit a part-time one.
This feels like a semantic non-sequitur. Maybe that's actually a great example of core of the problem at hand!
You're trying to argue a conclusion based on the specific word "donor", but many of these "donors" (or in this thread's case potential "donor") don't see themselves that way; they are not interested in "donating" with no strings, it seems like they are more interested in "patronage" or some sort of "sponsoring", where their money is not no-strings, but instead conditional on some specific threshold of level/quality of support/service.
Perhaps we just need a bit richer vocabulary for these discussions; if the project author is only interested in unconditional donations, that's their prerogative, and you're free to fork or fund accordingly. But also recognize that at the margin, "donate with no strings" is a much tougher sell for enterprises than "patronage will buy you X quality of service".
So if you're actually making an effort to turn an open-source project into revenue, I think you'll probably need to listen to your potential customers/patrons a bit more and give them the assurances they are looking for. Again, any open source author is free to do as they please! But as the GP notes, bringing money into the situation complicates things, and I don't think it's reasonable or rational to expect companies to start throwing donations your way without listening to what they want to get in return.
By my understanding, in the US, if you solicit donations and say you will do something specific with them (e.g., use them to pay yourself to work on a project), then those aren't really donations. They're payment for a service. You may not think that you entered into a contract with the "donors" by accepting the "donations," but you did. You made an offer to perform an action in exchange for money and someone accepted that offer by paying you. That's a contract and anyone who donated could take you to court to get the money back.
I do not think he 'deserves' to get paid. It is nice if he gets paid, but I dont even see a moral obligation (not speaking of legal). I mean the idea of gpl2 (at least from linus and my perspective) is nicely laid out here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
Paraphrasing:'I give you my sourcecode and if you change it and give the software away, please give me the changes'.
For MIT license (which Marak choose) (this is not in the video link), it is more like: 'please use this for whichever cause you like, I dont even expect software changes back'.
Everyone deserves to get paid (in the sense of moral desert; i.e. people "deserve" human rights.) You don't have a personal obligation to pay them, though.
Solving that discrepancy isn't going to be done in an HN comment; it's the Great Work of capitalist statecraft.
I agree he deserves to get paid like everybody else, but not because of this work he did. Unfortunately not all societies do that, so uually the common route to get paid is to get (a) work (contract), somebody is willing to pay for.
I believe prison laborers deserve to be paid minimum wage, despite their convictions and despite their inability to negotiate. Additionally minimum wage should be raised to a living wage.
You’re taking an overly reductionist view, incompatible with things like “equal pay for equal work.” He definitely deserves to get paid for his work, and it’s obviously a matter of by whom, and he’s fed up with giant corporations using his stuff despite being able to pay him, and he’s totally in the right even if he’s insert-some-undesirable-here.
I agree with the other commenter that "deserves" is a strong word.
If you want to sell something for money, you put a price on it. And people decide to buy it or not.
If you give it away for free, going back after the fact and asking for a donation is fine. But I don't think it's required. And it doesn't make people who choose not to donate bad in any way.
He should probably figure out his next business and get to working on that. Start a business, sell a thing, profit.
Having been on both sides of that pay discrepancy, I have come to the conclusion that most of our economic theory about the nature of business and competition is bullshit. I now see corporations as social organizations which exist to keep educated people fed and controlled, everything else is secondary. The sums are big because the money has to get divvied up amongst everyone, even if the work involved is just changing a hex value by the lowest paid and probably most technically skilled person in the network.
Yep, that money has to pay for not only the developer "doing the work", but all the overhead: the product managers, QA, release/deployment... then redo of work because someone used the wrong shade of blue.
He was co founder of Nodejitsu, the company who raised kickstarter funding for NPM, the same time NPM raised money from investors . There was a legal conflict about who owns NPM, they didnt refund or make a statement the money they raised for a project they don't own. That Kickstarter campaign was a scam and they got away with it.
It's more akin to Best Buy telling me I need to visit the house of every customer who bought my widget and slightly break it, otherwise they'll stop selling said widget. And if I try to tell my customer "Best Buy is making me do this", that's "irrelevant".
How is this a good analogy for them asking for the names and addresses of individuals to be taken down because they are worried that these might be a call to violence against those indivuals?
Are we talking about a widget which contains a piece of paper with the names and addresses of some local policemen?
> How is this a good analogy for them asking for the names and addresses of individuals to be taken down because they are worried that these might be a call to violence against those indivuals?
Apple is making a moral judgment here, likely based on pressure from the Belarusian government.
Let's look at it this way. Let's say you agree that the current Belarusian president is bad news, and is trying to maintain power by invalidating free democratic elections, and suppress other candidates by arresting them on trumped-up charges. If you don't agree with that, fine, but let's say for a moment that you do.
In that case, Apple's requirement of Telegram is in support of a repressive regime. While I'm not a fan of violence, I will acknowledge that sometimes it is necessary to apply violence in order to achieve freedom.
But the overall point is that what people say on Telegram is none of Apple's business. Strong-arming Telegram's CEO into complying with Apple's moralizing is an abuse of Apple's market position, based on their OS's DRM that requires all apps to be approved by Apple. That's not a world we should have to live in.
I get the general idea, but I just don’t think it’s that simple.
“In that case, Apple's requirement of Telegram is in support of a repressive regime.”
It’s possible that this is at the request of the Belarusian government, but it’s also true that Apple does have its own terms against promoting violence.
Either way, it’s not obvious that preventing doxing supports the regime.
If individual policemen are targeted, it’s not a given that this increases support for the the pro-democracy movement.
I also believe that sometimes violence is necessary, but that doesn’t make it obvious that it’s the right thing in any particular case.
There’s no abuse of Apple’s market position as far as I can see.
Stores are generally restricted in what they can sell by the legal environment they operate in.
Now, I do entirely agree with you that we shouldn’t have to live in this world. I do want a platform where no entity can control what I can install.
I just don’t think that world has a lot to do with Apple.
Apple isn’t going to build it, no matter what we do, and Apple isn’t doing anything particularly different from any other corporation that sells any good.
Governments generally don’t want Apple or anyone else to be able to sell software in an uncontrolled manner. Governments will tend towards imposing their own controls, and the union of the two sets of controls will be worse than the current situation.
If we want a freer platform we are going to need to build it.
There is a separate, co-operative effort by a consortium of manufacturers to improve and mass produce an existing ventilator design.
But with a project of this importance, while it makes sense to pool resources, you can't realistically have every company and every engineer co-operating on the same project. So it also makes sense to have several, independent efforts running in parallel.
Sadly latency makes this almost impossible. However, the guy who made Winamp came up with an interesting solution to this: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/
The idea is, everyone's playing is delayed by one measure, so they are playing along with people from the past, while everyone else is playing along with a past version of them. Kind of crazy.
The price advantages of globalised supply chains vs. the relative rarity of an event like this means that, during normal periods, firms using them will enjoy a significant advantage over those doing the "right" thing and market forces will weed out the latter. So I don't expect management to be taking a lead on this.
> The price advantages of globalised supply chains vs. the relative rarity of an event like this means that, during normal periods, firms using them will enjoy a significant advantage over those doing the "right" thing and market forces will weed out the latter. So I don't expect management to be taking a lead on this.
That's correct. It's a market failure that needs to be remedied through law and regulation.
Hyper-specialist species can amazingly exploit their niche, but they're the first suffer and go extinct when things get disrupted. It's the generalists that survive.
In industries where innovation matters, how do you regulate for producing a good enough product?
Could you regulate Intel to fix their 10nm process?
Do you want a laptop with the reliability of a Fiat, or the reliability of a Toyota?
Not saying it is impossible, but countries quickly run inito problems when their home produced goods are strictly inferior to the imported goods on price or quality or other metrics.
A hyper-specialist will be the best at some thing or another, and bad at a lot. A generalist will likely not be as good at those things, but it can be good enough at them, and not nearly as bad at the other things.
The market, as you note, selects for hyper-specialists, but crises aren't kind to them.
Strictly inferior home-produced goods are better than no goods at all, and the capability to produce them may have systemic benefits (in flexibility, resilience, avoiding certain kinds of path dependence and local maxima) that are not visible when looking at the goods in isolation.
What law and regulation can do is keep a nation on a more generalist footing, and keep it from hyper-specializing too much.
> From tax cuts to relaxed regulations to tariffs, each of President Trump’s economic initiatives is based on a promise: to set off a wave of investment and bring back jobs that the president says the United States has lost to foreign countries.
Obviously. It needs to be enshrined in law. Stress tests, like for banks. It would also be more efficient / profitable for banks to keep lower capital reserves...
Edit: alternatively, countries could be much more trigger-happy when it comes to banning flights from potentially infected areas where some kind of virus starts - basically a lot of false alarms. Companies would simply have to adapt.
Another possibility: don't do any industrial bailouts and let high-risk investors take their medicine. Next time, risky businesses will find it more expensive to get capital, as investors realize some things they weren't thinking about before.
The problem is how long it takes for that to occur. If the bankruptcies occur immediately, then people learn. If the bankruptcies occur 30 years down the line when a rare event occurs, then the high-risk investors are the only ones left in the market.
If investors can comprehend the 30-year T-bill, then they can price in a bankruptcy expected 30 years in the future. If we can sit here and figure out on our own that a business that will fold if its revenue decreases by 10% for longer than a month is not worth as much as its P/E ratio would naively suggest, then surely other people can figure it out too.
There are reasons why US prefers to bail Boeing. US is always concerned about espionage and dependencies on other countries with respect to national interest. An example would be the whole Huawei+5G debacle.
What if Boeing goes bankrupt and the only reliable plane makers are PRC companies (usually state-backed, even if it's not explicit)?
Boeing needs to be broken up. Parts critical to national security can be federalized. The rest can be restructured to restore competition to the market and eliminate the 'single point of failure'.
Boeing's efforts to consolidate the entire US aerospace industry into one company have hurt our society.
> Boeing needs to be broken up. Parts critical to national security can be federalized.
Where that division line might be isn't clear to me. For instance the 737 is both a civilian airliner and a military maritime patrol aircraft (as the P-8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_P-8_Poseidon)
If Boeing goes bankrupt all of the assets are still there and all of the employees still remember how to do their jobs. A company collapsing is a pure-paper action that means "fire everyone in charge." In some cases, depending on how the corporate governance is set up and on who holds the equity, it's the only way they can be fired.
If the US wants to help out US manufactures for strategic regions, it can apply the usual "made in USA" government purchasing rules, or maybe a tariff.
The problem is, while all this paper shuffling is taking place, state-backed players like Huawei can dominate a market in the interim. Not a good outcome to say the least. I agree that some structural change is needed, but it doesn't have a trivial solution.
Well, the flip side is that during times of crisis, one would expect market forces to weed out the former kind of companies (leaner, and with globalized supply chains). So which ones survive, and which ones are out-competed are a consequence of which set of market forces we soften and which set we allow to play out.
And the edge of that coin is: once we're past this crisis, the same market forces that created this peril will start cutting the redundancies from the survivors, setting us up for the next crisis couple decades down the line.
Yeah, not only is this a once in 100years event, it's also staggered in such a way that the Chinese manufacturing will likely be caught up by the time the European and North American economies are coming back to life.
> it's also staggered in such a way that the Chinese manufacturing will likely be caught up by the time the European and North American economies are coming back to life.
It's more difficult than that. Links in the supply chain aren't independent. Supply and demand must balance. Chinese manufacturing is spinning back up just as European and US demand is dropping. This will cause further damage to the companies on the supply side. And as Europe and US spin their economies back up, China may not be able to meet the growing demand in full. It'll take a while before this reaches something resembling an equilibrium.
SARS in 2003 and H1N1 in 2011(?) - in the age of increasing globalization and population it seems like odds of this are increasing, we have skirted and now had pandemics more than 1 in 100 years.
Global Viral Outbreaks Like Coronavirus, Once Rare, Will Become More Common: Urbanization, globalization and increased human consumption of animal proteins are driving a rise in epidemics
This doesn't mean that many of those who were younger and without pre-existing illnesses weren't in a serious condition and in danger of dying, just that, with the help of intensive care, they were able to survive.
If and when heath services become completely overwhelmed and there are no longer enough hospital bed/ventilators/doctors and nurses to provide the assistance they need, then we'll likely see a lot of younger and otherwise healthy people start to die as well.
It's that the opposite of what they are saying. In a situation where you just described when the system in italy was very openly overwhelmed young people not only didn't die there's very little evidence they got sick, to begin with
Was this due to triage where resources were focused on younger people with complications as the medical professionals felt that it was a better use of limited resources?
In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the streets.
Imagine a future where you do a swab test every morning while brushing your teeth. If you had any of thousands of infectious diseases, you're required to stay home. The test would take only 5 minutes, and you get fined if you don't do it, and receive sick pay if you test positive.
I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher rather than lower.
Imagine a future where you do a swab every morning while brushing your teeth and your testosterone and adrenaline levels are evaluated for likelihood of engaging in Anti-Social or Anti-Authority Activity. Individuals with high levels are locked into their apartments and subject to online training courses. Repeated violations result in a visit from the authorities.
Yeah, no thanks. Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.
But it needs to be based on good science. As someone in thread said, the false positive rate needs to be staggeringly low. And the false positive for Testosterone -> AntiSocial behaviour is huge - marathon runners to entrepreneurs and weight lifters.
So the idea is good - test people for something bad they will do - but the ability to test reliably for all the bad things is real low. I think we shall just stick to past crime not FutureCrime for now.
And honestly, using "bad authoritarian governments do bad things with good tools so we should not use those tools" does not make a good argument. it just means we need to double down on democracy.
I don't think it is a good idea or good tool at all. I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. I used the example of "Anti Social" behavior as a joke and I thought that was obvious...but apparently not. The idea is entirely antithetical to a free society.
As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through personalized incentives and social encouragement, not through authoritarian state action.
> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house.
In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.
You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily reasonable.
> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.
The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.
Yes it is. Science advances one funeral at a time. The most scientifically reasonable thing can still be wrong. If an authority forces everyone to do the same, then everyone would be wrong. And this is all assuming that there is zero corruption at play, which is unlikely.
Everyone should do the scientifically proven swab test every morning. The test has very strict requirements that were created by politicians and industry professionals working together! As it happens, only one company creates a rigorous enough test to fit the criteria. Thus every test is bought from said company. Is the test actually any good? Of course! Who has ever heard about bs being published as science before?
> The most scientifically reasonable thing can still be wrong.
Yes, it can be. But you still should do what science says because relying on science is the only way you could make knowledge base decision, because science is the only way we actually know things.
If you decide to act other way to what science dictates and it leads to better outcome, then you were right by sheer luck and can't really claim that you made the right call. You made the wrong one which by sheer luck turned out well.
Do you brush your teeth? Have you ever looked into why brushing your teeth is good scientifically? How many people do you think have done that? Yet we all brush our teeth or at least believe it's good for us. We're not basing our decision to brush teeth on science. We're basing it on the word of other people.
Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science. Should we believe them too, because they claim it's science? You can't verify every single thing whether it's "based on science" or not. You need to use heuristics and sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails. Taking away people's choice means that this happens a lot less.
As an aside, I would like to contest the idea that science is the only way we know things. Most science that ends up in practical use has a lot of handwaving of details in it. We describe some parts of it, but everything else is filled in by our instincts and knowledge. Few sciences are as pure as mathematics, where you can reason over things on paper without needing an extra assumed context. In most cases when science says we "know" something it is meant in a narrow context. We extrapolate based on that into other contexts and most of the time it works fine, but we often don't know.
I'm doing it for the feeling of freshness and believe it's good for me because of what I believe to know from science and personal expeirience about existence and influence of microorganisms.
I try to avoid putting qtips in my ears even though people are doing it because science says that it has higher probability of doing harm than good.
> Other people can also say the craziest things and pass it off as science.
That doesn't make it science and you should base your decisions on science not things passed as science. You should use your critical faculties and knowledge of scientific process to tell what science is and what is not.
You definitely should verify every single thing that informs your decision proces if the decision you are about to make is an important one.
> ... Sometimes those heuristics lead people to do something different that ends up being the better way to do things than what science at the time entails.
Science offers heuristics to guide your decision process. If scientific heuristic exists and you are using your own instead, you are doing wrong (even if by chance it ends up well).
If there's no scientific heuristic for given problem ( you need to check! ) then by all means make up your own. You won't be wrong unless you make "let's ignore what science established" a part of your heuristic.
You'd be amazed how much of the things you consider instincts filling gaps in science was actually researched for very practical fields. A lot. When money is on the line people suddenly get very interested in actual reality and they do the research. Some of those instincts get confirmed, some get thoroughly debunked. There was no knowledge untill science properly investigated it. Just self propagating ideas, right or wrong.
Probably the best thing a woman can do upon discovering that she is pregnant is to see a doctor. Under your argument, it would be ‘scientifically reasonable’ for pregnancy tests to automatically track your name, age, and location, and then send your results to your doctor.
Obviously this is a massive violation of privacy...which is exactly the same issue.
Yes. It would. It doesn't not because of sacred privacy, just because technology is not there. Currently tracking is too much of a burden to do at test level and introducing it would harm usage.
But when you go to the doctor to confirm pregnancy you can be sure you'll be tracked, because it's easy and it's reasonable thing to do.
I assure you, no one buying a pregnancy test wants an anonymous corporation or the government to be informed of the results. This has nothing to do with technological feasibility and everything to do with privacy concerns.
Your definition of reasonable seems to be pretty warped. The historical abuses of "this opinion is reasonable and scientific" are too heinous and numerous to even list. Thankfully we have (but still need more) consumer privacy laws.
No ones wants it. And yet if it comes out positive and you visit the doctor to confirm, it is known to an anonymous corporation, sometimes multiple, and government, if it cares. And everybody is perfectly fine with that.
Historical abuses are vast and many in all the fields of human culture. Proportionally to the power of given part of the culture. Abuses don't automatically make given thing completely worthless. Historical abuses are just things that we need to be on the lookout for.
There are already a bunch of things you are not allowed to do in a free and democratic society if it is unsafe for other people if you do it.
If there exists a home test that can test you for dangerous infectious diseases, and you are forced to take that in the morning before you go out, then this is comparable to not being allowed to drive while under the influence.
Everyone has access to those swabs, either for free, included with their health insurance plan, or at a marginal cost. It's not mandatory to use it every day, but there are incentives such as automatic sick pay and discounts on health insurance. On the other hand, there will be serious legal consequences if you test positive, decide to go to work anyway, and end up infecting other people. If it was your employer who told you to come in, your employer bears those consequences instead.
Money speaks louder than common sense. One of the reasons law exists is to tweak the incentive structure so that they align better with common sense.
You’d have to have a staggeringly low false positive rate to be able to do this, because you’d basically have no prior, and you’re testing for multiple things.
If a false positive results in someone staying home and getting paid, one can easily work out the economic cost of that. Then it becomes a simple economics problem - how much should the government spend on improving the test to regain a bit of productivity.
A false negative (someone going about their day despite being infectious) is just the status quo, and has served us well for centuries.
I would expect a gaming system to emerge (to force positive test results when people wanted time off without suffering any consequences). Done well, that might be the most valuable purely wasteful invention ever created.
Where I live, it's common for people to just call in and stay home for the day when they are sick. They don't need to game a device or convince a doctor. There is some trust. Maybe this could be tried elswhere?
When the money comes from the employer, there is incentive to root out and eliminate significant fraud. When the money comes from the sky/government, there is much less.
We have a nice wooden fence that was (properly) built around/over the roots of a city-owner tree. The city later removed the tree and the fence now looked dumb where it had been trimmed around the roots. A neighbor stopped by and advised me that I should call the city and have them pay to replace that section of fence. Said it shouldn’t be my responsibility to pay for it. I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”
> I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”
That's a really dumb argument. I can list a thousand things where I shouldn't pay (all) of it, but I should pay (1/10000) of it as part of having the city pay for it.
You're playing a cheap rhetorical trick, not winning a real debate.
The money actually comes from the employer. Employers are obliged to keep paying until the sickness is over. (The details are complicated, but this guarantee generally lasts two years from onset.) Employers have insurance against longer episodes but short-term they usually eat the cost directly. It's in the budget.
When employers suspect employees of fraud they will investigate. They can ask for a sick note but most do so only after a few days. Three days is customary. When a case is handed over to insurance, the insurance company will tend to involve its own doctors to assess the claim.
Imagine a future in which employers can also gain history to such health data and ensure jobs are given to the people of superior health. Such means will be necessary for economic health and progress of human civilisation. Marriage prospects, political and administration posts, etc can all leverage advantage from such a better policy.
Not even the strongest proponent of civil liberty would allow a person to walk down the street shooting bullets in every direction. It's not hard to imagine that spewing viruses all over the place will be treated just the same in a society with knowledge of modern epidemiology. Your rights ends where they begin to impinge on those of others.
We do need a better standard of privacy, though, than what South Korea is currently offering to the unfortunate souls who are infected. The tracking data is supposedly anonymized, but nobody gives any thought to the fact that anonymized data from multiple sources can be easily combined to de-anonymize them.
Until the first economic downturn, when the ruling party throws it all out the window, cuts taxes, and cuts interest rates. And the rich people will eat it up.
> tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries.
That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.
Tracking and testing doesn't destroy economic activity. Complete lock-downs, as we're seeing in China, Italy, Spain and soon elsewhere do. But it does let you get a grip on the situation when you have millions infected.
However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.
South Korea has also shown that restrictions on movement don't need to be particularly draconian. The subway in Seoul is still packed with people every day, but I haven't heard of any mass infection related to the subway. Everyone cleans their hands and wears face masks, so it's okay to be out and about. Oh, and there's a clean bathroom in every subway station.
> Oh, and there's a clean bathroom in every subway station.
So this will never work in the United States.
Snark aside, every time I ride a BART elevator with a pool of piss on the floor I wonder about this country. Somehow the idea of someone peeing without paying is so offensive that we would rather stand in piss than provide public facilities.
If you can make it fine grained enough so people are only isolated for a few days around their personal most infectious time, productivity losses would be minimal.
The productivity loss only happens when testing is inaccurate and entire communities are told to stay home for months just because it's hard to identify exactly who is coughing out germs each day.
As a sibling said, this is already where we are in Europe.
But if we had a system such as this, we could have prevented the first patients from spreading it around, and so we wouldn't have had to have millions of people stay at home.
If you run your CSS files through Autoprefixer[1], it's possible to use the latest syntax, and have it automatically converted to all necessary older ones.
Depends on where you source your browser usage statistics, but IE9's share is smaller than IE8's. For example, caniuse.com[1] has IE8 on 3.18%, and IE9 on 2.13%. Later versions of IE (and Windows) are better at auto-updating, and people using them seem to be more willing to upgrade.
I'm lucky enough to work for a company with a last-2-versions support policy for IE, meaning IE10 and 11 are all I have to worry about. I can't understate how much nicer it makes web development. So much of the bad reputation of web technologies stems from wrestling bugs in old versions of IE and the lack of proper layout capabilities in CSS.
To be clear, the caniuse.com stats are sourced from StatCounter Global Stats[1], not from the site itself, so they should be fairly reliable, albeit averaged across the world. Obviously, nothing beats measuring for your own site and audience.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments