chimprich

"Indisputable". Actually, it is disputed.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10076766/

That's absolutely not true. The standard for new vaccines, iirc, required a period of something on the order of 7 years.

I'm going to stop you there. "That's absolutely not true" versus "iirc". You're making a vehement argument based on remembered nonsense.

There was no such requirement. And if there was, then you should have no problem citing it.

I could go off forever on this topic

Please don't.

The amount of obfuscation and gaslighting

Such irony.

And they were rushed out

This implies that corners were cut. They were not. They went through the full regulatory procedures.

many people still sit with the issues they caused

Few medicines are entirely without side effects. The effects of the virus were in general far worse. Millions of lives were saved from the vaccines.

Not a win

Apart from the millions of lives that were saved.

at the very least, they reduced the confidence of average people in vaccines and gave credence to the anti-vaxxer

This was thanks to scientific illiteracy, cynical political opportunism, and rancid leadership. The vaccines were a huge success by any reasonable measure.

it is a very common problem on the left -- taking the words literally and out of context

This is a very common problem on the right -- whatever Trump says gets constantly reinterpreted into something more favourable.

This wasn't out of context. It was part of a broader and systematic attempt to play down the pandemic.

He had multiple opportunities to clarify what he meant, and declined. When explicitly asked if the "slow the testing down" remarks were a joke, Trump said "I don't kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear."

He then kept repeating the argument in subsequent tweets on 23 June: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more... With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"

Grow up.

Another common problem on the right -- argument by insult.

I don't think Trump or any of his appointed lieutenants think any of this through. It's the result of decisions made by emotion, not logic. "Vibe-governing" in other words.

Climate change, and science in general, is associated with nerds, boring reality, obstacles to immediate gratification, and effects on poor people.

Fossil fuels are associated with large wads of cash, action films, and sticking it to the libs.

Decisions might have terrible consequences. Who cares? Thinking things through is boring, and the people making the decisions are rich enough to be insulated from anything that might happen and old enough to not be around when it does.

Russia's war against Ukraine has never been about getting more territory,

That's completely counter to everything we know about Putin's mindset, and completely counter to all his actions so far. How would a war for territory look any different to what is occurring now?

when Ukraine has to be a sovereign and neutral state

That's an oxymoron. Why does a sovereign democratic have to be neutral? A democratic state has the right to pursue whatever alliances it chooses.

Wouldn't walking away from your house, maybe with a reparations package, be better than it being blown up by drones and your family killed?

Please explain your analogy. Everyone should give up their property whenever they are threatened? For free, or whatever the aggressor chooses to give them?

I don't think we need to go to war. We need to find a way to deal with Russia with humanity instead of treating them like some boomer-era cold war bogeyman.

What does that mean? How would you deal with them with humanity? Just give up your country when they invade?

Trump being a temporary phenomenon would be a more plausible claim if his presidency had been a single term.

I enjoyed "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company" by Dalrymple, which has a specific focus, but conveys a fascinating history of British involvement with India.

I've used Cursor a lot. Until recently it was mandated by my employer. I can't see the attraction at all. It's a (bad IMO) IDE integration, a reasonable model (but I still generally preferred Claude over Composer), and a bunch of other tools that weren't very developed (like cloud environments and multi-agent orchestration). It's a suite of tools, most of which have superior alternatives. What am I missing?

If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.

It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.

but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it

The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.

And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.

Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.

Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.

why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.

Yeah, masks and intentionally antagonizing police doesn't scream peaceful protest

They wear masks in case their political opponents take exception to their actions and hunt them down later and hurt their families.

(This seems like an extremely dubious justification to me, but I've been told on HN that this is the reason that ICE wear masks, so why wouldn't it apply here...?)

The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".

I recommend you watch this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...

It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text.

Unless you think there's some magic or special physics going on, that is also (presumably) a description of human conversation at a certain level of abstraction.

There's plenty of tasks that can take hours that don't save their progress. E.g. running a simulation, training an AI model, rendering video. Or, these days, leaving agentic AI models running in a loop implementing tasks.

Even if the state is recoverable, it doesn't mean that it's simple to recover.

I would be infuriated if my OS decided to shut itself down without permission.

get in between a federal officer and a suspect, and hope you don't get shot

Sometimes standing up to tyranny does require bravery. Like the protestor in Tienanmen Square. Did he get shot? We don't know.

Comments like your only serve to incite more violence.

How so? We are clearly talking about the Pretti case. All the violence was from the paramilitary operatives. All Pretti did was film and stand in front of a woman who was being beaten and pepper sprayed.

Are you saying that the populace needs to learn to submit or else more violence will be inflicted on them? And that I should stop posting my opinion in case it angers the authorities or inspires more people into nonviolent resistance? If not, please clarify.

However, once you actively get in the way of official federal policing business, you are no longer a peaceful protester.

That is absolute nonsense. You can be a peaceful protestor whilst still inconveniencing the authorities.

Possibly the most famous non-violent protestor of all time is the unnamed man who stood in front of a column of tanks at Tiananmen Square.

Another contender would be Gandhi, who promoted civil disobedience for peaceful protesting.

You can't give all the blame for the deaths to Hamas. They gave Israel a monstrous provocation, but the decision to kill tens of thousands of civilians, and collective punishment by denial of food, water and medical care was the Israeli government's.

If party A is using a human shield, and party B decides to kill the human shield to get revenge on party A, then who is culpable for the death? I don't think it's an entirely obvious answer. I don't think anyone who can easily and automatically put all the blame on party A or B has really thought it through.

becaue of the terrorist urban warfare tactics hamas and palestinian islamic jihad are using

This is ridiculous.

I don't want to be a Hamas apologist; they're certainly brutally cynical enough to use civilians as shields, but in the case of Gaza, what else would you expect them to do?

Urban areas are strong defensive structures, and 75% of Gaza is urban. Where else would you expect them to fight? It would be unrealistic to expect Hamas to take on the IDF in open farmland so they could be annihilated by Israeli air power.

Are you arguing about the number of shots or the location?

https://news.sky.com/story/10-shots-in-5-seconds-how-did-the...

On top of which they have matching ICE issued vest with inscriptions.

It's a fascist theme to have paramilitaries not wearing uniforms. See for example the mukhabarat in Syria. It makes them more intimidating, because they look undisciplined, and adds confusion to protestors as to whether they are dealing with someone who is part of the legal system. Why on earth would they not be issued with uniforms?

Yes, accidents like this will happen when you shove law enforcement officers with a gun on you.

Pretti did not shove any "law enforcement officers". The first physical contact is a shove on Pretti by one of them.

BBC did a frame by frame analysis: the first shove happens at approx 1:00 in this video. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/l0057wmt/bbc-verify-an...

If you disagree, please provide a source.

The first time they seem to be aware that he has a firearm is when they disarm him, and the execution happens after that, so I don't see how that is relevant.

Really? That's why they have vests that say "POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" front and back ?

The paramilitaries that executed Pretti are all wearing street clothing, and all wearing different clothing. They look like a mob.

Dangerous people that could identify their faces and kill their families in retaliation.

Well that's convenient, because it also allows them to kill protestors or their families without any consequence.

Why are the protesters assaulting them covering their faces

Pretti didn't assault them, and wasn't covering his face. He got executed anyway.

Because if it were actual fascism, like the Hitler/Mussolini kind, you'd be arrest/dead the moment you spoke anything against it.

It looks like you have paramilitaries roaming your streets - not wearing ID or proper uniforms, covering their faces to avoid identification, not answering to usual democratic controls - executing protestors.

In the latest incident, they seemed to be beating and spraying a woman with a chemical agent for filming them, and then executing a bystander who tried to help her. The regime then tried to deny reality and falsely claim that they'd attacked said paramilitary operatives.

In any Western democracy (and I'm not sure if the US is currently part of that category) there would be a public investigation, but they seem to have been squirrelled away and the politicians who have spoken out about it have been threatened.

This all seems to be fascistic by any reasonable standard.

Yes, Britain and France have aircraft carriers but they are old, small and likely to be sunk by modern hyper-sonics

You clearly don't have any idea what you're talking about.

The UK's two aircraft carriers were commissioned in 2017 and 2019 and carry 60 and 48 aircraft respectively.

They do it since that is the safest place to stash money long term.

Only historically. The calculus is rapidly changing. If the US can't even respect sovereign territory of friendly countries, it doesn't inspire trust that they would repay debt.

To that end, NATO lacks the capacity to meaningfully impact a conflict in the Pacific. The EU simply does not have the means to project power in that way

This has been repeated elsewhere in this story. What's your thinking here? I assume you mean the non-US members of NATO, but you seem to have forgotten two G7 members if you're equating NATO - US with the EU.

The remaining members include two nuclear-armed states, five or so aircraft carriers, submarines, several large air forces, navies, etc. What would make them unable to project force into the Pacific?

Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened.

But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?

Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.

Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.

I think "meetings" are a poor (or at least, very inconsistent) way of making friends. Doing activities together is the best way of making friends. Bonus points if it's for multiple hours, or there's an element of risk where you have to look after / trust each other, or stay overnight somewhere.

Examples include clubs for walking / running / cycling / scuba clubs etc. It doesn't have to be physical activity, but since you need exercise anyway, then you might as well get those endorphins whilst socialising.

Most of the murders (homicides) in the USA are committed using illegal weapons

Hardly relevant. If you control guns better, you get fewer illegal weapons as well. Most of the murders in Europe are committed by illegal weapons as well.

Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime

Of course it would - see the reduction in gun violence in countries where this has been implemented.

Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population

Oh. You're one of those.

It's a peculiarly American thing to try first to look to race to try to understand something, when there are more salient correlations.

Presumably since Black Americans are overrepresented as victims of gun violence, you'd like to see a significantly higher proportion carrying guns?

That has never been his opinion. There are many interviews with him on YouTube and I suggest you listen to them.

I've viewed and read an interminable number of interviews with Cummings.

He decided that a) Brexit was a good idea (we can see how that turned out), b) he decided to help get a Johnson government elected, and c) joined his administration as de facto chief of staff and chief advisor. If that's not a tacit approval of Johnson and his government, then what is? Of course, he backtracked later when it was a disaster.

The empirical evidence from the US does not bear that out. Compare murder rates between the US and any peer country with more gun control.