I don't know where you live, if you even live in the US, but that is a travesty that you weren't able to access quick testing. In the Bay Area, I get free testing through Project Baseline. My family has alternated getting tested once every 2 weeks, since our assumption is that if one of us gets COVID, then all of us gets COVID. Collectively we have been tested around 15 times,including children, and it's a breeze to get here.
But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.
Just as an aside, it's not necessarily the case that all your family would get infected if one of you does... in studies the proportion of family members who get infected is between 10-50%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
My wife got infected around 10 days ago (PCR confirmed last Wednesday, now seemingly recovered and testing negative) and while I exhibited some very mild cold symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, a single high temperature reading) it never went beyond that (so far, knock on wood) and I tested negative when tested at the same time...
Good point about the flu. I also had some flu symptoms around that time and always tested negative on antibody tests.
> The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
You're arguing that it's a travesty and a crime that the US didn't have something which no country in the world had, or even came close to. That probably wasn't even remotely feasible based on what other countries achieved and the fact that there was limited manufacturing capacity for pretty much everything that would be required to do so.
The frustrating thing is, it's not even surprising that you think that. For nakedly partisan reasons, the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts, warping perceptions of how everyone else was doing in the process. It worked too - they got the guy voted out of office at the cost of massively misinforming everyone about the biggest crisis facing the world, not only in their own country but elsewhere in the Western world too.
> the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts
PG&E charges much more than 20c. Depending on the tier, it could be over $0.30/kWh. If you have time of day charges, it's even higher during the day, something ridiculously high.
Sometimes, the "science" is wrong. Everything from low-fat diets, to high sodium diets, to DDT, to MSG. Many of the things that we have literally been indoctrinated with have been fully wrong.
Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
> But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
I don't see that being very practical. The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions. I doubt I'd be able to make much sense of a research paper on virology or epidemiology, despite that I consider myself scientifically literate in the general sense.
The answer is to have credible communicators of science. The best way to do that is with credible institutions. If the assumption is that this is impossible, the game is already lost.
> the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
Broadly agree, although I think anti-mask sentiments are due to mindless partisanship rather than listening to Fauci's early lie.
> The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions.
Reading the scientific literature is still "trusting the science".
Are we replicating experiments to see for ourselves if the data is correct? Are we re-working the error calculations to make sure the statistical evaluation is correct? Are we studying the topic so we're informed enough to identify poor work as well as the peer reviewers?
> ... even Fauci, told people that masks don't work.
So, this troubles me.
One thing about science, of course, is that you need to be certain of your measuring equipment, and of your observations.
I cannot find any evidence that Fauci ever said that "masks don't work".
I have found:
* Late Feb: "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis"
* March 8th: "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask"
* March 8th: "When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
* March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill."
I see:
* ~"No need to panic at this time" (Feb)
* ~"Masks do not confer perfect protection, make sure to use them correctly, social distancing is still required" (Mar)
* ~"Reserve PPE (e.g. N95 masks) for the people who need it most" (Mar)
And shortly after this time, his recommendation changed to strongly recommending masks, when three critical things changed: asymptomatic spread was established, PPE supplies were beginning to stabilize, and testing determined that cloth masks are roughly as effective as surgical masks (not N95 masks).
All of those statements and decisions strike me as reasonable, from a spokesperson for public health in that time frame.
My memory of last spring is that masks were not recommended for the general public, but the clear message was that they do work, otherwise they would not be recommended for health workers.
I do not ever remember any non-political health professionals saying that masks do not work. So it troubles me to see it repeated ad nauseam that Fauci said such a thing.
"When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
What do you think is being communicated here? It makes you feel better, but there are unintended consequences is worse than they don't work, it is saying they are worse than nothing. Around the same time the Surgeon General more explicitly said they don't work.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Which was an absurd statement at the time - if they are not effective for the public, why would health care providers need them.
This a classic communication error. Media can't handle subtlety of message. It's a mistake Fauci should not make, being a decades-long expert.
But I hear, and I heard at the time, "Masks help, but they are not perfect, and if you use them in the obviously-wrong way, they are useless or harmful".
Which aligns with my understanding of every tool used for any purpose.
The Surgeon General, OTOH, was never a person to be taken seriously. But I don't blame Fauci for that.
Again, this is repeated a lot -- but it does not match my memory, nor can I find evidence of it in my searches.
If you know differently, please share a link.
> He could have suggested cloth masks.
IIRC, the consensus pre-COVID and post-SARS, was that cloth masks are inferior to N95 masks. When the supply of N95 masks was not considered unreliable, there was no need for public health to think about bandanas.
In Feb/Mar, before asymptomatic transmission was proven, it was reasonable to not bother suggesting cloth masks, and simultaneously to preserve the "useful" (N95) masks for the most at-risk.
> US is so dead.
There were so many failures. The system that Fauci was relying upon turned out to not have been funded. Maybe he should have known that, but I'm not sure he had visibility into the problem.
I see Fauci as the firefighter who arrives at the scene, hooks up the hoses, and discovers that the hydrants are dry and the city hadn't bothered to tell anyone.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that. He has definitely made some mistakes, but the system which is supposed to back him up has completely failed him and all the rest of us.
"I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct. We were told in our task force meetings that we have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs," he said.
It makes no sense since cloth masks don't cause PPE shortage.
> IIRC, the consensus pre-COVID and post-SARS, was that cloth masks are inferior to N95 masks. When the supply of N95 masks was not considered unreliable, there was no need for public health to think about bandanas.
It's inferior but still better than nothing.
So, you agree that cloth masks are better than nothing.
> In Feb/Mar, before asymptomatic transmission was proven, it was reasonable to not bother suggesting cloth masks,
"They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!"
Why would you say masks are NOT effective? With emphasis on NOT.
Fauci never refuted this tweet at the time, so what were we supposed to think?
> I see Fauci as the firefighter who arrives at the scene, hooks up the hoses, and discovers that the hydrants are dry and the city hadn't bothered to tell anyone.
It's more like he showed up and said water didn't help put out fire. Let's not use water.
He also didn't regret it because, well, we were in the water shortage period.
> He has definitely made some mistakes
A mistake that caused many lives.
He made a bad judgement call. Bad at communication with public. No idea how to manage crisis.
Just say "hey, it looks like a flu. We should be cautious and cover our face with something. Please don't buy n95 because doctors need it".
At the time, I covered my face in public and kept saying masks worked, and I felt like an anti-vaxx for going against "science". What a shit show.
"Masks" meant something different in March than it does now.
Cloth masks were a thing in Asia, but the US had never thought about them much. They were not available for sale.
When Fauci discouraged use of masks among the general public, but implored that they be conserved for medical professionals, he was speaking in the context of PPE. N95 masks, etc.
Sometime in March, people started asking "well do cloth masks work at all"? And there was no consensus answer until (IIRC) early May.
Maybe someone should have said "Hey, we don't know for sure, we've never studied it -- but they use cloth masks in Asia and they have more experience than we do. They certainly can't hurt as long as you recognize clean side/dirty side, and wash them regularly. You can't buy them, but you can make them. Don't make them poorly."
Remember that Fauci was sidelined for a while in there though. And that his job is not public health communications management.
I really don't think you can blame Fauci for the failures here. His messaging, when able to speak, was not that confusing or contradictory. And yet he still got in trouble with the people who wanted him to be less honest. He was simply not able to counter the extreme bloviation and misinformed dishonesty coming from the administration. And he received death threats for trying!
Blame Deborah Birx, a bit, for conflicting signals and bending to pressure. Blame Jerome Adams, for not having the background to separate truth from fiction, and lacking the strength to demand accuracy and clarity. But even those two didn't have much power, their biggest error was lending the appearance of credibility to the broken process which employed them. Blame their boss for having an agenda at odds with direct and honest communication.
Anthony Fauci did not save us, nor did Robert Redfield. We all wish they had. They both spoke honestly when given the chance though, and in a functional government, they (along with the rest of NIAID, CDC, HHS, and OSG) might have given the country a fighting chance.
Or maybe not. Most of the rest of the world is in pretty rough shape too.
> Maybe someone should have said "Hey, we don't know for sure, we've never studied it -- but they use cloth masks in Asia and they have more experience than we do
Nah.
Putting any filter between 2 people are going to reduce particle exchange. Even bad filter would do.
Isn't this just physics regardless of whether it's classical or quantum?
Asian countries don't have greater insight. It's common sense. Someone coughs at us. We put anything on our face to reduce the particles reaching us. Somehow you tried to argue that this was a recent scientific discovery.
We can agree to disagree.
The fact remains. Fauci could have easily recommended bandana or any type of face covering. He didn't. He even admitted he lied for the greater good. He didn't even think of bandana. And this is the best person we have in US...
> Putting any filter between 2 people are going to reduce particle exchange. Even bad filter would do.
That's really not true though.
Early speculation included aerosol transmission, which is not effectively stopped by cloth.
Anyone strongly endorsing cloth for aerosol containment would have been wrong, and blamed for misleading the public, and lost their job, probably.
Current estimates put cloth masks at a ~15% reduction in transmission by droplet. This is significant and important and makes them worth wearing! But if it had been aerosols, they would be <1% effective. And if people believed them to be effective, more people would have been infected.
We will disagree on whether Fauci lied. I believe that he did not lie, although I do believe he was duty-bound to speak when no one had perfect information, and that some of the things he said were misinterpreted.
I never read anything from him that communicated "masks do not work". I did read "masks are not perfect, most people don't know how to use them correctly (N95), they are awkward and uncomfortable to use properly, they are essential for health care workers, they are in short supply, and having a false sense of security is dangerous". This is the message I took from him last spring. Although I was definitely aware of the dishonest noise in the air, it was not coming from Fauci.
I wish he had been in possession of perfect information, and had been able to communicate it with perfect clarity, and without interference from batshit-crazy alternaquacks. No one else was better though. Many were far worse.
> We will disagree on whether Fauci lied. I believe that he did not lie, although I do believe he was duty-bound to speak when no one had perfect information, and that some of the things he said were misinterpreted.
Two points that are worth repeating;
1. The precautionary principle. We should be more cautious. This is crisis management 101. It was way more likely that masks would help than not.
2. Fauci admitted he lied as in he didn't regret anything because of the PPE shortage. Not because he thought masks didn't work. This implied he believed masks worked but didn't want to say it out loud.
> But if it had been aerosols, they would be <1% effective.
If it was aerosol, many many more people would be infected. It would have been 10x. This was already unlikely back them.
Again, with the lack of data, we should have been more cautious. Not less cautious.
Even aerosol was true, wearing masks would still be better.
"False sense of security" is mostly a myth. It's a pandemic. We could have done both social distancing and wearing masks.
Not sure why you assume wearing masks and other activities are mutually exclusive.
Just because I wear a firefighter suit doesn't mean I will run toward every fire I see. Be real.
Considering this part of his statement I think his message might have even more subtle than that:
but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
I suspect at the time of the statement, health care works where struggle to get PPE, which would not have been helped by the run on masks by the general public.
In that context I see this a plea for the public to understand a mask in the hand of a medical worker is much more valuable than one in the hand of a member of the public. So lets try and help the medical staff before we try and help ourselves.
The US Surgeon General is a political appointee, with a largely ceremonial role and little policy influence.
Some have been better than others, but they mostly serve as a mouthpiece for the administration's agenda as it relates to health-adjacent matters.
As such, when the President does not take a health matter seriously (historically: AIDS, opioids, obesity, guns, tobacco, mental health, drunk driving; newly: COVID-19), the Surgeon General is not to be taken seriously.
As I've not been commuting for a couple of years, I am way behind in my podcasts. Just this weekend, I listened to the March 10, 2020 episode of "Naked Scientists" (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/), a British radio science show from Cambridge. Chris Smith, a virologist, (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/users/chris-smith), at that time, said to buy beer rather than masks; you'll enjoy the beer and it'll protect you as well as a mask.
His concerns were that (1) cloth masks wouldn't help, and (2) that wearing masks incorrectly wouldn't help either. He was wrong about (1), but (2) is still a problem.
I'm sure I'll have opportunity to provide updates as I get further along. :-)
The Nature podcast didn't get on the mask bandwagon until early June, when they had an interview on the effectiveness of masks in this specific case.
No one I've seen has said that medical masks don't work.
Maybe the population wouldn't have to reserve N95 masks for medical personnel if:
* the production hadn't been outsourced to China which then decided to ban exports while also accepting the PPE donations of other countries
* the government would have noticed that there's a pandemic brewing, and instead of saying "nothing to see here" would have ramped up PPE production or at least procured PPE from the market.
* failing all of the above, at least instituted an export stop so that the remaining PPE wouldn't have been bought from under their noses.
But yes, when one fails so utterly, one has to end up begging the people to work against their own interests with predictable results.
And yes, Fauci and the surgeon general lied. Nothing ambiguous about it, even if they were trying to save PPE for medical personnel.
Whether they work for the general population is maybe a concern for Fauci, the government and the odd HN commenter. The message was that they don't work to protect individuals from the virus, hence they should not be bought by normal people.
That's obviously false. And an individual will be first and foremost concerned about their own safety, not if they can single-handedly stop the pandemic.
It's not obviously false, because there were studies available at the time that showed masks did not work to protect individuals, especially members of the public.
But, again, I'd be interested to read any studies you have that were 1) available at the time and 2) showed benefit of wearing masks.
I've linked this somewhere else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25479729. This references studies from the SARS times and for flu. N95/FFP2 masks are pretty well established, they were used by front line workers in all the pandemics in the last decades.
That's why most Western countries were stockpiling them - as protection in case of a flu pandemic.
saying that masks work, is a tad simplistic. there are many types of masks, and while they have their benefits there is plenty of evidence that mask wearing has not inhibited the virus from spreading in the population. there is little evidence that the casual masks that are being worn have significantly reduce the risk of exposure.
fauci was well justified when he said before that mask wearing isn't the solution to this pandemic, but now any nuanced discussion is not tolerated, which, perhaps, is the reason people aren't trusting the science. another reason is that politicians are making arbitrary decisions claiming it is what science (facts and data) told them to do.
Science is always wrong to begin with and it gets close to a correct answer with iteration. It’s actually not at all a solved problem how to communicate “science” to the public. Your comment is a perfect example of one of these annoying fallacies I see around covid messaging. Don’t you think they “changed their tune” because they got better data that showed that masks are helpful? You seem mad that they couldn’t conjure clinical data in early 2020 that showed that masks cut the transmission by X%
To go one level deeper, I feel your comment exhibits a fallacy as well.
Sure, science progresses over time. It's fallacious to say that science is wrong because we used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Evidence evolved, ideas changed.
But dismissing all instances of scientists changing their mind, when they really just lied, as "oh, evidence evolved" is the kind of thing that (I feel) erodes trust in science.
I think the evidence is strong that advice against masks was a lie meant to prevent panic, not honestly communicated "best we could do at the time" science. A lie with good intent for overall public health, but dishonest nonetheless.
Evidence is nice, but sometimes it makes sense to reason from known principles. SARS-CoV-2 was known to spread through respiratory droplets almost from the beginning. Particulate respirators are known to protect people against respiratory droplets. Surgical masks are routinely used for source control of respiratory droplets in surgical settings. A mask recommendation made a lot of sense, even before there was data suggesting they were specifically helpful against SARS-CoV-2.
"For respiratory exhalation flows, the critical size of large droplets was also between 60 and 100 μm, depending on the exhalation air velocity and relative humidity of the ambient air. Expelled large droplets were carried ... less than 1 m away at a velocity of 1 m/s (breathing)." --
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0668...
Hence the idea of social distancing (for airborne droplets) and frequent hand washing (for surface contamination). (And, of course, staying home if you have symptoms like coughing or sneezing.) Convincing people to use masks consistently and correctly has previously been shown (and remains!) to be an uphill fight.
(I note that there was a meeting of epidemiologists in March, 2020, where famously, no one wore masks. How far are you willing to to go to lie?)
Later, it was found that viruses could be carried by much smaller particles, much farther.
"Our laser light scattering method not only provides real-time visual evidence for speech droplet emission, but also assesses their airborne lifetime. This direct visualization demonstrates how normal speech generates airborne droplets that can remain suspended for tens of minutes or longer and are eminently capable of transmitting disease in confined spaces." -- https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11875
In general, I think you are right. In this case, the person involved admitted in an interview with "The Street" 6/12/2020 that it was to keep the supply for healthcare workers.
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
> it was to keep the supply for healthcare workers
I've heard this argument several times. I don't buy it at all. They could have instructed people to make their own masks especially since everyone was stuck at home. There is no shortage of fabric that I'm aware of. It also would have given manufacturers more time to produce masks.
Also, it's not okay to lie to the public, especially if you're supposed to be non-political. They deliberately lied and didn't apologize. There's no way I can trust someone who does that. That's not how my brain works.
I think it's a little more complicated/nuanced than that.
It's clear that some medical professionals felt the science wasn't there, and ofcourse it wasn't. The science takes a long time. i.e. there was no science that showed that for Covid19 the use of masks would make a difference. Sure, it's common sense, but medical professionals don't use common sense. There might have been some papers about the Flu (with mixed results) and there were some other random papers, but there was no clear evidence either way. If touching the virus and then touching your face is the primary vector then it is possible that masks make things worse. Again, to me it was always common sense you should wear a mask (and not touch it and not touch your face) but even here on HN people were arguing both ways given the existing papers/publications.
Then there's the nature of public health, where your messaging isn't necessarily about what's the right choice for an individual, but rather what's the right choice for the public as a whole.
I don't think the public would understand the nuance of make a mask vs. buy a mask, ofcourse there'd be a run on PPE. Even with the message there was a run on PPE. Good luck trying to find an N95 mask in Home Depot last year in the first few months of the pandemic.
I'm not sure what's the takeaway here, public health officials, and medical professionals are not really scientists, they don't communicate science, they have their own objectives. Generally their objectives should be aligned with our objectives as a public but they may not be aligned with our objectives as individuals within that public.
The bigger issue to me is how slow the response has been across the board in most places, because all those bureaucracies move at the pace of a snail, pretty much every country on this planet botched the initial handling of this (of special note is China ofcourse) and blew away our chance of containing this early on. By the time we were on the mask vs. no mask debate the die was already cast (and a lot of people wore masks anyways and a lot of those who didn't wouldn't wear one anyways).
> Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work.
They said that mask don't work in preventing you from contracting covid. This holds up to this day. As early as February, Fauci was saying that he was discouraging masks because he wanted make sure there were enough for healthcare workers and sick people, but people are acting like it was a secret agenda. I think that people are deliberately misinterpreting Fauci's words, so that they can blame someone besides themselves or their own social circle for the pandemic. People completely ignored stay at home orders and social distancing. Masks are only meant as a last resort if you have no other choice.
Having closely followed the mask discussion, they lied, plain and simple. Maybe they didn't specifically use a certain wording, but the aim was clear - discourage people from wearing any masks.
And N95+/FFP2+ masks work at protecting one from the virus, why else would medical personnel wear them? They work even when not worn perfectly.
Of course many are being purposefully obtuse and call those "respirators" in order to muddy the waters and don't even consider them to be masks, even if one wears them on their face and breathes through them. Those so-called respirators are high-quality masks, that's all there is to it.
> So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations. This may involve changing the institutions themselves to fix legitimate issues (like the funding fiasco), addressing misunderstandings by the public that also contribute to mistrust, etc.
There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As with many issues of our day, the challenge will be in disciplined focus on the issues themselves and what changes we should make to address them, instead of surrendering to tribal bickering.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.
I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.
As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.
Sure you can, go for it. But I doubt that many people have the time nor the skills required to actually come to some justified conclusion. The scary part is that many of them think they do. Often the very ones who tell you "read the science" or "just go read some papers" are the ones who dramatically underestimate the amount of effort and nuance it takes to synthesize the results of numerous researchers into a coherent meta-analysis. You can try, sure, and personally I enjoy it, but unless you're already an expert researcher in the field, you should be very skeptical that any conclusions you make are actually valid.
It takes an enormous amount of domain knowledge to reasonably interpret the statistics of experiments, epidemiological studies, etc. We may think we can read them and come to our own conclusions, but I think it's usually our hubris that leads us to believe that those conclusions are justified and not just rolls of the dice.
> We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations.
Putting it that way is putting the cart before the horse. Our institutions need to become more trustworthy, then we'll be able to trust them more. Even then, I suspect a certain level of scepticism is needed to keep them honest.
Not necessarily. If our scientific institutions are actually untrustworthy, then the public is correct to mistrust them, and acting to artificially increase public trust in them would be counterproductive.
> So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
For most people, even educated people, they are more likely to hold correct beliefs by listening to experts blindly than investigating papers themselves. Sometimes experts are wrong. But experts are wrong way less often than laypeople. A culture of a bunch of inexpert youtubers reading papers and convincing people of medical advice is perilous.
Scientific knowledge is _always_ wrong in a strict sense. Every law, every theory has a confidence interval attached. Every measurement, an error bar. Sometimes that confidence interval is really, really big, like our model of how gravity works when things aren't too big or moving too fast. Sometimes those error bars are really, really big, like how we though non-HEPA masks wouldn't really help prevent the spread of a novel airborne virus, so more conservative pandemic mitigations were necessary to prevent unnecessary deaths. The good news is that the scientific process emphasizes and incentivizes increasing those confidence intervals and reducing errors (but never eliminating them—that's impossible). We know a lot more now than we did this time last year. It's why we have not just one but several safe and effective vaccines, for example.
> It's why we have not just one but several safe and effective vaccines, for example.
Well, if I were to follow your skeptical line of thinking, I'd say that vaccines are never safe/effective, they simply have a confidence interval attached to them. Furthermore, vaccines made using novel processes have no long term data. Its never this simple :)
You see, we can't really apply such logic to every day decisions. The 'error bar' you referred to is of little benefit here, and also subject to the same skepticism. Its useful when you know a high percentage of the the variables, and all the mechanisms where data can be wrong/insufficient, etc. But you can't know that when you know so little of the pathogen. Its turtles all the way down :)
Also, HEPA masks cannot filter out COVID-19 (~ 100nm). HEPA filters, or sterile filters in general are roughly around 0.2um (200nm).
Agreed. I'm for healthy skepticism, not paranoia. But like everyone else I do have my preferences and biases. Given a choice, I'd much rather take a vaccine based on established 'boring' tech.
Oh, yes, I agree that for two different vaccines for the same illness, one of which was developed using novel methods / is of a novel style, and where the two different vaccines have individually been tested the same amount with equivalent results regarding safety and effectiveness, it usually makes sense to prefer the one which is of a style which has been tested more thoroughly.
Like, it probably makes sense to trust glass or ceramic glasses somewhat more than plastic or metal glasses, just by how long the technologies have been around?
I think I hadn't read all of your previous comment, and was largely responding to just the first part. Whoops?
I explained why you can't - Because you don't know what you don't know. An error margin or error rate or error probability or whatever error measure you choose to use, relies on your knowledge of the problem set. This is already known to most researchers. Establishing probabilities such as "life on planet X" or "existence of aliens" etc are problematic for the same reasons. Certainly these are not every-day decisions, but merely to illustrate the point. I suspect we might agree somewhere in the middle - maybe our disagreement is on what constitutes every day decisions?
I think it only really became a debate once a popular idea spread around saying that wearing a mask is to protect others from yourself. Before that, mask wearing seemed a little bit selfish or paranoid, but that idea turned it into a moral action. And morals give people a feeling of rightousness in judging others and fighting against them. Then when people start fighting, others find themselves in the position of enemy so they fight back out of indignation.
Well, this is how you get anti-vaxxers as well...don't listen to the experts blindly and do your own "research". Most of the population lacks the skills (as evidenced by general math scores) to make even a partially informed judgment if they were to do their own "research"...
If these ridiculous interviews don't produce top notch performance reviews after a year on the job, then the interviews are worthless.
If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.
Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.
Anything that breaks and changes semantics should not be allowed into the language. Let Python be Python, not a Frankenstein's monster of ideas like C++. If it were an idea that were Pythonic, you would not see the confusing examples I've seen in the comments. C++ is the poster child of trying to do too much with the language and it losing itself due to death-by-committee. It's very sad that Python has started down this road.
We seem to be seeing a paradigm clash. On one side, there are people who are concerned with whether or not a feature is desirable. On the other side, there are people who are concerned with whether or not a feature is desirable and also Pythonic.
> On one side, there are people who are concerned with whether or not a feature is desirable.
The thing is this: You can add something which, in isolation, seems desirable and positive -- but in the greater picture, is a net negative due to the complexity it adds.
People might say that those who do not like the pattern matching syntax are not obliged to use it. But when developing code in longer-running projects, far more code is read than written. Adding syntax, especially with complex edge cases, especially from languages which use concepts that are at the core quite alien to Pythons main concepts, adds a burden which is difficult to justify.
Very much so. I run into this with Clojure. It has so many different ways to skin every cat, each with its own unique blend of quirks, that it can be quite difficult to understand other people's code, and, by extension, use the language in a team setting.
That sort of experience leaves me thinking that this is a very dangerous turn to take for a language whose core ecological niche is, "Easy for professionals who don't have a BS in CS to understand and use productively." Lines 2 and 13 of PEP 20 are core to why Python, of all languages, came to dominate that niche. I am beginning to fear that the Python core team, being composed primarily of software engineers, is ill-equipped to properly understand that.
Yap. It doesn't make sense to destroy the language just to get in a particular feature. You don't need a language to do everything. It needs to be good at everything it's meant to be good at.
I very much want to agree with you. Only that I do not know any more what "Pythonic" is supposed to mean.
One thing that Larry Hastings refers to seems often to be underestimated - readability.
It seems nice to be able to do code golfing and use pattern matching to reduce an expression from maybe 50 lines to 10.
But what matters far more is that one can read code easily, without guessing, and without consulting definitions of edge cases. Even in smaller projects, one will read 10 times more code than one writes. In larger projects and as a senior programmer, that could be a factor 100 or 1000. Not that unusual to work one week through a bug in someone else's code, and fix it by changing a single line. As code becomes more complex, it becomes really important to understand exactly what it means, without guessing. This is key for writing robust, reliable and correct code (and this is perhaps why the ML and functional languages, which stress correctness, tend to be quite compact).
And while it might be satisfying puzzle-solving for smart and easily bored people, like you and me, to write that pattern matching code and reduce its length, it is just not feasible to read through all the PEPs describing surprising syntactic edge cases in a larger code base.
I can only agree. Compared to other languages I find Python increasingly difficult to reason about, mainly due to its dynamicity. If the language complexity increases as well from now on I don't think I will use Python unless absolutely necessary.
Some of the english documentation can be quite hard to read, but the code is very useful. Submitting PRs to improve the documentation is welcomed by maintainers.
Pattern matching is the brainchild of ML. Python, being a multi-paradigm language with the strong functional side, missed this simple in concept and powerful in practice language concept.
> Python, being a multi-paradigm language with the strong functional side
Coming back to that, just a reminder that lambdas in Python are still gimped, closures do not work as expected because of -- scoping, and core developers in Python 3 tried to remove with "map" and "filter" tools that are considered quite essential for functional programming.
As someone who switches between Python and functional languages, I find Python's "map" and "filter" to be a trap, and have taken to scrupulously avoiding them. The problem is that I expect those functions to be pure, and, in Python, they aren't. They actually can't be, not even in principle, because their domain and range include a core datatype that cannot be interacted with in a pure manner: generators. A generator will change its own state every time you touch it. For example:
>>> seq = (x for x in range(1, 11))
>>> list(filter(lambda x: x % 2 == 0, seq))
[2, 4, 6, 8, 10]
>>> list(filter(lambda x: x % 2 == 1, seq))
[]
In a language that is a good fit for functional programming, the last statement would return [1, 3, 5, 7, 9], not an empty list. But Python is imperative to the core, so much so that I would argue that trying to use it as a functional language is like trying to drive screws with. . . not even a hammer. A staple gun, maybe?
(Which isn't to say that you can't successfully use some functional techniques in Python. But it's best done in a measured, pragmatic way.)
A good example why immutability by default seems to be the right thing - in Clojure, "seq" would not have been modified by the first filter expression:
And also an example why it does not work to go and grab one or another desirable feature from a functional language, they need to work together.
> (Which isn't to say that you can't successfully use some functional techniques in Python. But it's best done in a measured, pragmatic way.)
A great example how it is done right is Python's numpy package. The people who created that knew about functional languages and APL (which fits nicely in since Python's predecessor ABC had some APL smell). The obviously knew what they were doing, and created a highly usable combination of a general data type and powerful operations on it.
Right. Because it's doing two different things. One is working with lists, the other is working with lazy calculations.
A common functional pattern is to do lazy calculations, so that you don't have to store every result in memory all at once. The subtext I'm getting at is that a language that has footguns that make it dangerous (for reasons of correctness, if not performance) to reuse and compose lazy calculations is a language that is fundamentally ill-suited to actual functional programming.
Which is fine! Python's already a great procedural-OO language. It's arguably the best procedural-OO language. Which is a big part of why it's taken over data science, business intelligence, and operations. Those are, incidentally, the domains where I feel just about the least need to program in a functional paradigm. And, in the domains where I do have a strong preference for FP, Python is already a poor choice for plenty of other reasons. (For example, the global interpreter lock eliminates one of the key practical benefits.) No amount of risky, scarring cosmetic surgery is going to change that.
OK I see, the very short sequence in your example was a stand-in for a potentially infinite one. I got nerd-sniped into understanding what was happening as I found the behavior surprising.
And that is sort of another layer to why I think that people trying to turn Python into a functional language should just simmer down. A core principle in functional programming is that you should be able to swap out different implementations of an abstraction without changing the correctness of the program. That's not really something that can be enforced by most functional languages, but it's at least a precedent they set in their standard libraries. But Python's standard library has a different way of doing things, and favors different approaches to abstraction. And those conventions make the Python ecosystem a hostile environment for functional programming.
Hylang is another interesting example. It's a cool language. But watching how it evolved is slightly disheartening. It sought to be a lisp for Python, but the compromises they needed to make to get the language to interact well with Python have hurt a lot of its lisp feel, and make it a kind of peculiar language to try to learn as someone with a lisp background. IIRC, Python's lack of block scoping was an elephant in the room for that project, too.
To be fair, that's a foot gun in haskell as well. Using lists non-linearly like this in haskell gives you the correct results but at a 10x performance tax or worse because it can't optimize into a loop anymore.
At least to me, a footgun goes beyond a mere performance gotcha. There's a whole category difference between, "If you do this, the compiler may not be able to optimize your code as well," and, "If you do this, your code may produce incorrect results."
> Python, being a multi-paradigm language with the strong functional side
I would doubt that. Surely, things like Numpy are written in a functional fashion, but Python relies very much on statements, iteration, things not being an expression, almost every named symbol except string and number literals being mutable, and there are no block-scoped name bindings which are essential to functional languages.
And the attempt to add the latter to Python might end in a far bigger train wreck than C++ is already.
Mixing OOP and functional style works, more or less, for Scala, but everyone agrees that Scala is a hugely complex language. And in difference to Python, it has immutable values.
What could turn out better would be to create a new language which runs interoperable in the same VM (much like Clojure runs alongside Java and can call into it). And that new language, perhaps with the file extension ".pfpy", would be almost purely functional, perhaps like a Scheme or Hy, without these dreaded parentheses. That would at least leverage Python's existing libraries.
Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.
Amazon and other FAANG companies have to be broken up by anti trust rules.
The existing anti trust rules are enough to push these monopolies to stop the anti competitive activities. Just like anti trust rules were used against Microsoft many years ago, which opened door to online competition like Amazon, Google, Apple etc.
I have zero faith that regulation here will realistically have any effect other than inching Amazon a bit closer to being a quasi-state service, and I also have zero faith in that improving customer service at all.
I should have added: regulate them to increase competition. When the long distance telephone market was deregulated in the 1990s, ending the monopoly of the Bell Operating Companies, prices crashed rapidly and service quality improved - albeit for a time.
Similarly, when you “don’t have a choice” except to work with, say, Google, there is no incentive for them to provide good service. Find a way to introduce competition and everything magically transforms.
If Amazon removes a product for wrong claims, Amazon pays the damages times N. A court, quick judgement, low or no expenses for the merchant. Apply to every jurisdiction Amazon works in.
Then Amazon would be wary of automatic bans.
Of course this must apply to every site like Amazon.
EU (and UK) citizens have the right that automated decision making that affects individuals must:
* be documented, and individuals must be informed about it.
* include simple ways to request human intervention or challenge decisions.
* be regularly checked to ensure it's working as intended.
This applies to anything with "legal or similarly significant effect on individuals". As examples, the ICO there has "automatic refusal of an online credit application" and "e-recruiting practices without human intervention".
IANAL, but I imagine this would cover the OP's situation if they were EU-based, and most similar complaints (Apple unilaterally pulled my app down incorrectly and won't answer my emails, Google wrongly closed my Gmail account). If a lawsuits & penalties start appearing under that umbrella, it might help change the monopolies positions.
Doesn't help in the US of course, but hopefully they'll follow suit in the coming years, which would apply quite a bit more pressure here.
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.
I had and still have the same suspicion. I had a lot of friends who said they had the same thing happen around the same time and they all just did it. The real tinfoil hat part of me wonders if it was to aid efforts being fed and ramped up by firms like Cambridge Analytica et. al. in anticipation for the 2016 election and their data collection ops as a whole.
Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs.
You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it?
(not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
It would raise some flags if my bank representative or doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to do so, would not.
Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose.
A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.
I show my ID to pick up my order from Home Depot. I’d suppose Facebook would be trying to prevent someone else from accessing your account, like Home Depot is preventing someone from taking my order.
Very different to flash an ID to a store employee than to give them a copy of your license tied to a highly-detailed account of online activity on and off of their platform :shrug:
There comes a point when the demands of the business outweigh the value of the services they provide. For some of us that will include providing identification, particularly in cases where the handling of the identification is opaque. These cases are far removed from letting front line staff glance at a card to compare your face to a photo or verify the details that you voluntarily submitted on a form. The only times I have let anyone actually handle my identification for services directed towards consumers were for financial services and with my employer. The latter case was only because I knew how the identification would be handled in the transaction.
In the case of Blizzard I would say no and accept my losses. (Well, let's say Steam since I have actually dealt with them.) In the case of Facebook or Google, I would say no simply because I don't trust their motivations.
Not answering a simple question about what the options are, followed by irrevocably deleting data the user wants. That’s what you think good customer support looks like? I never want to be your customer.
For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors).
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
Let's not forget that any time a competitor starts taking part of their market or becoming successful they just buy them out with an amount of money that is hard for any sane person to turn down.
The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't. And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So realistically competition is great on paper, but in this case the competition already has such market dominance that any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see how competition will do anything.
The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly opaque to the consumer and affects their safety.
The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control.
Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
What about giant app stores that control almost all consumer spending in those markets? How many businesses can survive being banned by both Apple and Google's stores? Or even by just one?
Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you can easily get a new email address.
Just to be clear, you are talking about the quality of b2b services, between parties that have entered a business relationship, not consumer protection.
b2b issues greatly affect consumers - there's no fabled "consumer choice" if a handful of businesses are allowed to dominate or decide who may enter their market/app store.
And when so many businesses are at the mercy of a few giant companies, we probably shouldn't deny them protection with the "it's a b2b matter" dismissal.
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
> When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated.
They created that page in order to highlight that there are no humans reading your mail, but OP's point that "it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services" is still true to this day. It's just that it's all automated.
> These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
They don't scan your emails for ads, they use your search history etc for ads.
Fair point, though I think that wording leaves room for interpretation...
Does learning your social graph by looking at email metadata (sender/addressee, location, time) count as "scan[ning] or reading your Gmail messages"? There are a lot of insights you could "skim from the top" if you control an entire communication platform, even if you don't fully dig into the content.
And regardless: to OP's larger point, the reason Google offers services such as Gmail for free isn't mostly because their support cost is low -- it's mostly because these services allow them to collect a large amount of data that is then used for selling targeted ads, far surpassing the amount of money they would earn from offering ad-free services.
All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they don't do that.
Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result?
Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.
The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot of gray area and there is a lot of information contained with an email that is not the "message" of the email.
Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?
> Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?
Yes, here is the official statement:
> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.
Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse.
That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?
The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.
Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
> why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad.
What does this have to do with anything I said?
I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity
Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to "scale".
Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.
This is a bit of a tautology. Of course if they spend more on service than the service makes them the margin is negative.
But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a small country as a rounding error.
That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer better service for it, they would still be making absurd amounts of money.
Actually their support in gmail is non-existing.
I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years. They haven't started testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused us to get better safety in some ways.
Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.
>And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years
Exactly.
Modern cars are optimized for "the tests" occasionally to the point of absurdity. As in certain systems get de-tuned (so to speak) so they are completely and totally used up at whatever the max test speed is because that's what makes the car look best in the benchmarks.
If we modernized the tests high speed crashes would be more survivable and low speed crashes would be less costly.
It's not all government's fault though. Society has a very unhealthy relationship with risk. If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
> If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
Or they're pedestrians who don't want to be cut in half in a parking lot. Car-on-car isn't the only thing in consideration here.
A crumple zone capable of affecting the deceleration of a 3000+lb car while complying with bumper strength requirements (though today's standards are much relaxed from those decades ago) isn't going to protect a sack of meat from a car. The bulbous front end plastics that take up a lot of space without much underlying structure, flimsty upper radiator core support and thin easily bent hoods are where the pedestrian safety comes from.
As you alluded to in the other comment, these would be safety factors not regarding the structure of the car (which should be focused on decelerating the car) but instead on mechanisms that alert the driver / automatically stop the car when it is going to hit a pedestrian.
We've made cars quite safe in this regard; I suspect there's more wiggle room to drop deaths with crash avoidance at this point. Backup cameras (now mandated by regulation), pedestrian detection, automatic breaking, lane change warnings, etc.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
"Regulation" gave you slavery. In the more natural state of affairs, you can't just go about enslaving someone without the risk of them running away or outright murdering you while you're looking away. It is the power of the state that captures the fugitive slave or punishes them for defending themselves.
With the arguable exception of slavery, social change gave us all those things. Regulation was just the part where we coerced the hold-outs to do as we wanted under threat of violence. Regulation in a democracy always lags social change.
There's a lot of policy to encourage competition that isn't regulation. The USPS helped with early airplane development by contracting out mail delivery to civilian pilots, and grants provided by NASA et. al are partially done to help with competition in the aerospace field (can't find a source for this one but the people I know in the space all agree this is by design).
Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple platforms in a period of time so short that it looked coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.
Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things, especially when reporters are calling for comment on a specific act.
If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick, even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide it.
> It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things
It's also likely that there's a higher threshold for being the first to take action. Once the first one takes action, the rest can hit their (now lowered) threshold much faster or even immediately. That can give the appearance of coordination, but the only coordination being that everyone was waiting for someone else to be the first.
That would be a good argument if there weren't public conferences, discussion panels, and work groups that these companies send representatives to in order to coordinate their efforts in "combating the rising threat of <insert boogeyman>".
lol, yeah, "networking". That kind of self delusion will come in handy as the cartel activity becomes increasingly bold and the regulatory capture ensures no way out.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
Regulatory capture makes it hard for new companies to enter a field.
It's one of the main reasons there's so much hype about SpaceX.
What seems to happen is that an oligopoly makes the written and unwritten rules so complex that they injure themselves, creating a power vacuum for deregulation or just someone saying "fuck your (unwritten) rules" and either staying exactly within the confines of the letter of the laws, or leveraging their popularity into getting away with infractions. "Oops, didn't mean it!"
That we root for the underdog is in part an expression of our shared pain in the stunted progress that was made up until that point.
Of course. I only presented a broad _sample_ of diverse industries which had, or have, problems with monopolistic behavior. I feel that I could have continued at some length, but my time is limited.
There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
> I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "competition" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
See how that works? Competition can also mean races to the bottom, price dumping, plus it works best with commodities. In every non commodity market competition is diminished and sometimes disappears naturally.
Good regulation can be a great answer to problems (and not just anti-trust). Bad regulation is... well, not a good solution of course.
For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook and other online services that I don't want to lose. I wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)
You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest; "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good regulation.
I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
Great comment. They probably are closer than I originally said.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
I agree with you about the potential that we're at the end of usefulness for our current system of professionalization. It's easy to forget how recently we've developed technology to cheaply distribute information about the past performance of individuals.
I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the organizations is have some strong form of identification that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar association (or whoever) can check that you are who you claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having people get public / private key pairs from the government (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a system.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
Always worth adding - snake oil was a legitimate thing based on traditional medicine in both Europe and China, imported to America. But then some folks found it more profitable to pass off mineral oil rather than bothering with the snakes.
> they would be spending billions on customer support
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
I think that's completely different from what was said in the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple for their behavior with the app stores and there are actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the same about them running a free email or social media service that has crappy support.
“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly state that companies can't do something or have to do something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of 1934.
"Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest.
Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.
> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort:
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
You pay for a license to be a developer on the app store. You pay for a phone. You pay for apps on the app store. You pay monthly for Stadia. YouTube aside, these are not free!
You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to be able to target you with personalized advertising. They use your data to train their AI and build better algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead they offer you some free services.
Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they offer?
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.
What exactly is burning at this point? I would suspect there is little oxygen left down there. Is it some other form of chemical reaction? They can't just dump boatloads of water to douse the flames? There appears to be enough water for things like fracking, we can't do the same here?
The scope of the problem is huge. Oxygen can enter from a highly elaborate network of abandoned mines and boreholes that stretch for miles, as well as any number of surface fissures. As far as the coal component, keep in mind that this region has the highest concentration of anthracite in the world.
If that's the only route in, then no. Because most of that is expelled gasses due to heat, there's no way that oxygen could go in if the gasses and smoke were being driven out by the fire.
I pray that you succeed against this battle. I know several people who have successfully battled cancer, one who is doing it at UCSF right now and UCSF is a great hospital for that. You're young and look healthy, I am looking forward to continued decades of your posts!
But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.