It's mind-boggling you actually conclude this from
> The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases.
> Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.
It's because the tweet takes the article it quotes out of context. This is what leads up to the quoted part:
> That study design, as well as those of other drug makers, came under fire from experts who worried that, even if it was statistically valid, these interim analyses would not provide enough data when a vaccine could be given to billions of people.
Kind of an important passage to leave out, don't you think?
Do you really think this was comic book supervillain?
I remember this happening at the time and my impression was that it was happening without a doubt. Particularly when they announced the results a few days after the election.
My thinking at the time was inside Pfizer the idea of turning an election on this data was deemed too controversial - they would forever be associated with Trump if he won again. That might cause issue with the Dems.
No idea but unless there’s proof of something shadier? That would be my guess - just an American corporation making sure it doesn’t piss off half the country.
Nah, the most comicbook supervillain event was the fricking New York Times publicly hinting that if the vaccine was approved before the election because enough evidence was found that not doing so would definitely do more harm, they'd push the narrative that it was only approved to help Trump win and that people shouldn't trust its safety, effectively undermining safety in the vaccination program just to make sure Trump lost. All the other morally and scientifically dubious attempts to delay approval mostly seem to be downstream consequences of that.
Now we scroll through feeds and pat ourselves on the back for increasing the average lifespan. No one asks whether these long lives are even worth living.
No one asks why progress for the sake of progress is inherently good.
False dichotomies are knee jerk response to certain flavours of progressive ideas. It's like "we should not go to mars until we've cured poverty/loneliness/inequality/evil on earth." You'll usually find such comments on any space related thread. "Nobody talks about" is almost always untrue. Usually, it's followed by a cliche, something that someone inevitably talks about. Someone always questions whether progress is actually good, even if the progress is something like not dying from cancer.
I don't particularly subscribe to romantic notions of causes worth dying for, but you can still die for a cause if aging isn't a thing. I daresay cannon fodder will exist, in some form... and it will be romanticised in the same way.
Causes worth dedicating life to... that tends to be more useful than dying for causes. In that frame, you have more to give if you have more life.
> "we should not go to mars until we've cured poverty/loneliness/inequality/evil on earth." You'll usually find such comments on any space related thread.
For what it’s worth, I used to find the arguments that we should put the brightest minds on space exploration over eliminating suffering as concrete, but nowadays.. can’t say they those arguments seem as watertight.. saying that as someone whose hands have touched some of these projects. Curious if others feel the same way or have points to make in the opposite direction
I think broad goals like "eliminating suffering" or "fighting poverty" tend to be in a hard to tackle middle ground.
We're better off approaching them either more broadly or more narrowly. IE, we can dedicate resources to tighter goals, like reducing childhood mortality... a horrendous thing that most people suffered for most of humanity. We really made a lot of progress on this.
Alternatively, we can think of it more broadly... advancing as a species, culture and society. In that sense, space travel is a good idea.
Tackling the elimination of suffering head on is likely to resolve to "be a politician/priest/lawyer" or somesuch.
In any case, I think the mistake is thinking of everything as competitive, at a broad level. Rather, people tend to see ambitious, "humanities' first" goals as competitive with "eliminating suffering" or other broad goals. It's rare to hear people think that sports or cinema are competitive with the elimination of suffering.
I do not need a cause others find noble. I will make my own. And I do not need anyone evaluating if my life is worth extending. What I need is more quality time with the people I love.
That sounds a lot like propaganda line from a book of previous victors who got to write the history.
While I think you are not completely off - there were just undertakings that needed sacrifice of human lives - this line of thinking seems to be stained forever through constant cynical abuse by the powers that be and powers that aspire to be.
I was in talks with a recruiter for a large defense contractor (not Lockheed, but in that ballpark), and the recruiter bemoaned the fact that it was hard to find cybersecurity folks because of marijuana. He said it was an acute problem for their Bolder, Colorado office.
Literally the first two questions he asked me were:
1.) "You know what we do right? And you're ok with that?"
2.) "You don't do recreational drugs, do you?"
> Essentially all American white people continue to materially benefit from a long history of systematic racism in America [0], including slavery, state-mandated and state-tolerated post-slavery subjugation and segregation. Heck, many living white Americans are direct beneficiaries of overt discrimination in public programs, not to mention systematic, coordinated private discrimination.
I come from a family of poor farmers in the South. I've done some genealogical digging, and thus far I've found three 16-24 year old members of my family who died in the Confederate war. We never owned slaves; service was mandatory back then, either through law or social pressure.
Approximately ~600-700,000 people died in the Civil War. This country has made sacrifices for African Americans and racial equality, more than any other country on Earth. It will never be enough.
No matter how much they give, apologize, change the rules, white Americans will never shed their "original sin." Because of my white skin, I "continue to materially benefit" from "systemic racism," and yet, where are these benefits? I come from a place riddled with opiate addicts and alcoholism. Most of the younger people don't make it out, they have to score much higher than African Americans applying to the same colleges (as do Asians).
Everyone was on board with MLK's dream of equal opportunity for all. Racial discrimination was clearly a bad idea. But, in the last 10 years or so, some people have realized that "racism" is perhaps the most powerful bludgeoning tool in the US. Now, MLK is outdated, the new movement is about racial revenge.
Like a lot of poor farmers rent or share farm equipment today, poor farmers overwhelmingly rented slaves at critical points in the growing cycle in antebellum rural South. Slaves were expensive, about $100k each in today's money, so poor farmers rented them just like any farm equipment today can be rented by those that don't have the capital to buy outright. Use of slaves was ubiquitous, even among those who didn't outright own the slaves.
What would MLK say about billionaires using identity politics to distract the working class from any kind of solidarity? That's what I believe is happening here. A lot of identity politics started after Occupy Wall Street.
A racially divided nation is profitable, and it's much harder for workers to organize.
He had choice words for white moderate push back against change for racial equality, even if it's ugly in the moment to said white moderates.
> I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
> I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
As for connections to Occupy Wall Street, my view as some one connected to the scenes is that they're orthogonal, and instead both rise from the beginnings of a generational shift in existing power structures.
> "One unfortunate thing about Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan 'Power for Poor People' would be much more appropriate than the slogan 'Black Power'."
Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here, 1967
In the context of 1967, he's talking about taking to the streets and creating a separate black nation in a concept called "black separatism". Nothing about that is against the idea of a company making sure that they have a diverse set of employees across the structure of the company, if we can stay on topic. Nothing about it rails against "identity politics". He's not saying, if you read the whole book (which you should, it's fantastic), that the black struggle doesn't require a different set of tactics from the poor white struggle. Only that there exists some overlap that would be served by making sure that every person in America makes a good living (in addition to other separate struggles). Particularly since black separatism in a lot of cases meant leaving the US and the society that was built using quite a bit of under(or simply un)paid labor and the wealth that belongs to all here.
I'll give you that anyone saying that _only_ corporate identity politics can solve racial issues in America is blowing smoke up your ass, but honest looks at why companies as their employees become richer trend white and male is an important component of the fight for racial equality.
> Because of my white skin, I "continue to materially benefit" from "systemic racism," and yet, where are these benefits?
Less likely to be arrested or incarcerated, less likely to be stopped or harassed by police, less likely to be denied a job or mortgage. Those are some of the major systemic privileges White people have that Black people don't in the U.S. The statistics are pretty stark.
Read the paper, as it's not just those two names. Black names are undeniably discriminated against at the earliest points of the employment process.
This is something I like to bring up, since it's a great example of a microcosm of discrimination that it's easy to not think about. There's a black saying that blacks have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and the data seems to be remarkably close to that assessment.
>Less likely to be arrested or incarcerated, less likely to be stopped or harassed by police
Communities which experience more crime tend to interact more with law enforcement. The perpetrators of those crimes, who generally come from the same communities as their victims, tend to get arrested and incarcerated in proportion to their rate of criminality. Most murder in the US is committed by black men [1], and mainly concentrated in a handful of poor urban areas: St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, etc. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) [2][3], widely seen as the gold standard for data on criminal victimization, confirms that violent crime is simply a larger problem in America's urabn black communities compared to the white, Asian, and Hispanic communities. Rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration reflect this.
It is no longer the 1960s. Body cameras and smartphones are everywhere. Racism has been taboo for decades. Police know that if they unjustly shoot or abuse a black person, there's a good chance their careers and lives as free citizens will be over. The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.
Tracing back through history, the forces which led to the present situation such as slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and redlining were undoubtedly racist and systemic. However, these systemic forces are now gone. They have even been replaced in many areas by systemic counter-forces, such as in university admissions [4], law school admissions [5], med school admissions [6], access to government debt relief [7], and access to the COVID vaccine [8]. The problems which bedevil many black Americans today- disproportionate poverty, broken families, drug addiction, all resultant criminality- would appear to be the results of historical inequities, not ongoing systemic racism.
> Communities which experience more crime tend to interact more with law enforcement. The perpetrators of those crimes, who generally come from the same communities as their victims, tend to get arrested and incarcerated in proportion to their rate of criminality.
Over-policing and racial profiling is a large cause of the increased criminality. The base rate of illegal drug use is fairly similar for all races but arrests and convictions have been much higher for Blacks and other minorities for quite some time [0][1].
> The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.
Actually, traffic stops are biased against minorities despite a similar base rate of infraction [2] yet this increases the rate at which Black people interact with police which compounds the harm caused by statistically harsher reaction to infractions. Further, sentencing is influenced by race in complex ways for which there is unfortunately limited data [3] but Blacks tend to receive longer sentences and be at risk of minimum sentences [4].
The root causes of violent offenses are even more complex and although income disparity, childhood trauma/abuse/neglect, and oppression are all potential causes I haven't found good sources with solid statistics to dig into that.
Flippantly, it's entirely possible for someone to be both paranoid and to have enemies.
People who are poor, and especially those that live in rural areas, face serious difficulties. But minority Americans face those same problems, plus racism.
"Everyone was on board with MLK's dream of equal opportunity for all. Racial discrimination was clearly a bad idea."
Everyone? Clearly a bad idea? I could rustle you up a big stack of people who disagree. Weirdly, many of them are poor and rural---you'd think they would see the common cause and join together, but no. On the other hand, there's the old joke about everyone having to have someone to look down on; they may be white trash, but at least they're not black.
> The statistics are pretty stark if you start with the incorrect assumption that "all men are created equal." This is, quite simply, not the case, and will never be the case. Of course, hell will freeze over before anyone accepts that "horrific" truth.
> I'm sure you recognize different dog breeds, and possibly know that certain dog breeds are known to act a certain way. This is due to generations and generations of artificial-selection in breeding. Herding breeds were designed for herding, German Shepherds were designed for herding and protection, Shitzus were designed for companionship.
> You probably wouldn't expect to see a Shitzu herding sheep. That does not, in any way, make Shitzu's "less than" a herding breed, they're just built for a different function. Shitzus evolved in environments where companionship was prioritized over herding, obviously.
> And yet, when it comes to humans, we choose not to acknowledge this fact: geography influences evolutionary pressures, and evolutionary pressures influence the humans that evolved there. You see this in culture too. Cultures evolve just like the humans that belong to them do, and it's a big soupy mess of genetics influencing behavior/culture, and behavior/culture influencing genetics.
> Expecting African Americans to act like neurotic white protestants is fundamentally racist, you're trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. Human diversity is real, except it goes beyond skin color. On average, racial groups exhibit similar behavior, across socioeconomic spectrums. Racial groups evolved in similar geographic regions, they are optimized for survival in those regions, around those people.
> "All men are created equal" is perhaps the most harmful lie ever told.
Just to fast forward the discussion for some people so they know the conclusion noofen is leading toward.
Thanks. Their comment is (flagged) (dead), which is one of my least favorite parts of HN. For a site that doesn't let you delete comments after two hours because it believes you should stand by what you say, it structurally removes your most egregious comments from view. That allows dog whistle arguments to fester and comments that mistakenly go mask off to be conveniently hidden quickly from the general discourse.
In America, it's better to be born white and poor than black and poor. Data from field after field backs this up - economics, healthcare, policing, housing, to name a few.
Further, I don't think you can exactly call losing the Civil War "making sacrifices for racial equality." If I've got my boot on somebody's neck, and I won't take it off until pushed off by force, my skinned knee isn't a sacrifice that I made so that my victim can get up.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 230 of the CDA entails[1]:
> Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"
What Section 230 says is that all providers of interactive computer services are not liable for user content. That's it. It doesn't matter what the interactive computer service does, or publishes or doesn't publish. If you're a provider of an interactive computer service, you're shielded from liability for user uploaded content.
Thanks for the details. I'm curious though, couldn't traditional publications just say their articles are "user content" and absolve themselves of all legal liability, like defamation?
Assuming that content was paid for by the company, either by contractors or employees, I think a court could see through that being called 'user content' pretty easily.
If it's just uncompensated randos...well then it wouldn't be a traditional publication anymore.
Since the work was generated in the course of that employee's duty with the company, I'm not sure why you think the company would be absolved of liability for the content they themselves commissioned. That employee is the company in this capacity.
Yea, that makes sense. I'm wondering how it works with something like TikTok's Creator Fund [1] or Twitter Blue content creators (who might be compensated in the future), or even Medium.
I'm sure that if TikTok reimbursed a creator for content that was disparaging/illegal, the chain of suit would involve both the creator and TikTok. Barring complex indemnification agreements in whatever contracts were signed. S230 doesn't magically make companies "immune from everything" like a lot of people seem to think. It just correctly clarifies that person A posting on site B generated the content, and is who you should sue first if it's disparaging.
That's "how it works" with the laws in place today, there doesn't seem to be a deficiency.
This is likely a reason why YT and others demonetize controversial videos - for their own preservation, they don't want to fund the creation of content that might lure a suit.
I don't think anything's broken here. Definitely nothing that would be fixed by this Florida bill.
> S230 doesn't magically make companies "immune from everything" like a lot of people seem to think
However, some companies do think that Section 230 shields them from all liability for their interactive computer services, and lower-level courts seem to agree with them[1].
The case here[1][2] has made its way to the Supreme Court[2], though.
If the first amendment didn't exist the government could force a bakery to bake Nazi cakes. They can still force you to bake cakes based upon certain protected classes. So I guess if political affiliation became a protected class then maybe the government could force a bakery to bake a Nazi cake? I dunno.
> So if all the banks decided to stop doing business with all Democrats, you'd argue that was protected by the First Amendment?
Correct, it is. It would be foolish business, but they could do it. At least, that's my understanding.
What would more likely happen is this:
> Business announces no-Democrat policy
> Policy goes viral
> Business cancels policy due to public pressure and other businesses cutting ties due to the bad PR
> Republicans yell about 'cancel culture'
---
> So if you own a bakery and a Nazi insists you bake them a Nazi cake, you have to bake it I guess?
The first amendment literally works the opposite of this. That's exactly the kind of thing a business can refuse (though in some cases there are narrow carve-outs for certain types of identity).
You're being downvoted because of the misinformation in your post. Facebook isn't a publisher when it comes to user-made posts, so calling them one is misinformation.
> This isn't about Section 230. We need new legislation to reign in the unchecked ability of Silicon Valley to curb speech they disagree with.
Unchecked? What happened to the free market that the GOP constantly talked about, the sacred thing that the government shouldn't interfere with?
Not to mention there's no actual evidence of this:
> systematically denying their political enemies a platform.
What's happened so far is conservatives breaking the rules much more heavily than progressives, and then getting very upset when the consequences kick in (though to be sure, I've seen leftists getting mad about this too).
There is no "admission you're a publisher," it's a meaningless concept with respect to the laws that are on the books. The law is: hosts of user-generated content can remove that content at their discretion, and still not be considered the "speaker" of all the other content they do not remove (obviously, because that would be impossible to police at scale, and obviously because obviously Twitter did not make the post).
If you kick someone out of your restaurant for being loud and boisterous in the dining area, you are not suddenly responsible that someone was disparaging a public figure the next seat over and you chose not to kick them out.
> I'm not an expert on this by any means, but isn't this an admission that these companies act like publishers? Yet they have Section 230 protection?
Having some standards doesn't automatically make you a publisher. A site with user-uploaded videos that removed, say, all porn, would not make itself a publisher.
Now, obviously there's the question of, how many restrictions until you're a publisher? I'm not sure the law is clear on that.
> Now, obviously there's the question of, how many restrictions until you're a publisher? I'm not sure the law is clear on that.
As a provider for interactive computer services, you're afforded unlimited restrictions on the content you choose to serve. Section 230 of the CDA applies to all interactive computer services and their providers, no matter what.
From the EFF[1]:
> Section 230 says that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230). In other words, online intermediaries that host or republish speech are protected against a range of laws that might otherwise be used to hold them legally responsible for what others say and do. The protected intermediaries include not only regular Internet Service Providers (ISPs), but also a range of "interactive computer service providers," including basically any online service that publishes third-party content. Though there are important exceptions for certain criminal and intellectual property-based claims, CDA 230 creates a broad protection that has allowed innovation and free speech online to flourish.
Thanks for this. Though I'm not gonna trust it 100%, even though I like what it says, since, y'know, the EFF is obviously more inclined towards that take.
I've had COVID, and this is why I will not get vaccinated, despite CDC recommendations. It's very creepy how they've buried treatments and promoted experimental vaccines.
I think GPs point is that if you were optimizing for the best health outcomes, you wouldn't demonize promising, or at least benign, non-vaccine treatments. Doing so makes it seem like the vaccine push is optimizing for something else.
Not GP, but I am not until a vaccine is approved by the FDA for non-emergency use. And even then, I think I will wait for more data to come out about the long-term effects of the vaccines.
