most of the critics of this particular vaccine are the ones that took it. either the people who got covid anyway or were injured by it.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris
I took it in 2020, and have taken booster shots. I got COVID... This year. I felt like shit for two weeks, was fatigured for a month, and had a lingering cough for two.
Nobody's promised them that they won't get COVID after taking it. What is promised is that on the whole, they'd be less likely to get sick, get milder symptoms if they do get sick, and be less likely to require hospitalization or a mortician if those milder symptoms are still serious.
It was and is safe and effective. You're doing exactly what I'm talking about - moving the goalposts.
If you think they need to be moved some more, I'll point out that the vaccine didn't come with a free pony, either, and that airbags and seatbelts kill ~50 people/year, and that you might still get ran over by a bus even if you look both ways before crossing the street.
Perhaps any statement in that context should be assumed to be oversimplified; but I don't think I can fault someone for taking words to mean what they literally say. The COVID vaccines look great so far on balance, but they absolutely were oversold to the public. We'll pay the price in public confidence for at least a generation.
Could you give the whole paragraph, and not just the last sentence in it?
Ah, heck, I'll do the work of pasting it in.
> But again, one last thing. I — we don’t talk enough to you about this, I don’t think. One last thing that’s really important is: We’re not in a position where we think that any virus — including the Delta virus, which is much more transmissible and more deadly in terms of non — unvaccinated people — the vi- — the various shots that people are getting now cover that. They’re — you’re okay. You’re not going to — you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations. -Biden
I'm not sure why out of all that Trump-lite-contradictory rambling (and the massive amounts of other words and ink spilled by both the 2020[1] and the 2021 administrations on this subject), that sentence is the singular, unqualified, pinky-swear blood-pact promise that you think the medical community made to the public regarding the vaccine.
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As for Walensky:
> Three days later, on April 1, a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments, telling The New York Times “Dr. Walensky spoke broadly during this interview” adding that “It’s possible that some people who are fully vaccinated could get Covid-19. The evidence isn’t clear whether they can spread the virus to others. We are continuing to evaluate the evidence.”
If you're only going to listen to the first thing that's said on a subject, and ignore everything that follows, I don't think that sort of approach will serve you very well. For one thing, it'll probably mean that you'll think that people who correct themselves are idiots.
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[1] Which, if I may remind you, developed, recommended, and rolled out the vaccine and had nothing to do with Biden.
I'm not sure what the rest of the paragraph adds here? Nothing in that qualifies or contradicts the absolute that I quoted. Are you just saying that the statement was so generally inarticulate that any reasonable person should have ignored it completely? That was true here, but that's not great for public confidence either.
I'm aware that the scientific literature told a more nuanced and accurate story, but only a tiny fraction of the population have the skills and time to study that. I don't think you can fault people for trusting their elected leaders; and if you do, then who are you expecting them to trust next time?
> a CDC spokesperson seemingly walked back the director’s comments
So after widespread criticism by actual scientists, she didn't even correct herself in her own voice, instead sending an unnamed spokesperson to smooth it over without explicitly acknowledging error. I can't believe you don't see how the damage is done.
In a March 29 2021, MSNBC interview, Rochelle Walensky stated publicly that CDC data suggested "vaccinated people do not carry the virus" and "don't get sick". a knowingly false statement at the time and at best an inexcusable error from the head of that agency.
I also had covid this year, zero boosters, had a mild fever and sniffle for two days. not sure what you are demonstrating with this anecdote. or what goalposts you think I moved. the "milder symptom" stuff all came long after it was obvious that the covid shots were not doing what had been promised. that is what I would call moving the goalposts
“nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.”
This is a straight up lie - because “adverse reaction” does not mean “I felt achy for a couple days and maybe had a little fever,” it’s actually a VERY specific term.
But you are trying to peddle falsehoods.
Most people know nobody who “had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots”
respectfully it is not a lie, and more than a half a dozen people I know personally lost function of their hands, legs, were hospitalized with myocarditis, had local paralysis/palsy. I personally lost the use of my hand for two months and it took two more years to recover.
and when people like me say things like this, inevitably someone like you comes along to tell them they are dangerous for saying it out loud. In fact, the government was actively censoring people from being able to express this on social media.
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
experienced something very similar. thought I would leave my field permanently out of frustration and despair. I like my work now, but faced with that burnout again do not think I could power through it a second time.
Apropos, I had chronic pain throughout this experience. I thought it was just aging, irreversible, and something that compounded my hopelessness. It's very surprising to be 10 years older now but feel 20 years younger. Books like "The Body Keeps the Score" or "Healing Back Pain" used to seem woo to me, but now I am convicted that health comes from within as much or more than it does from without.
I had sciatica for years and inflation in my hips so bad I could barely walk 500 meters while in college. Basically only kept going by iboprufen, naproxen and paracetamol. I tried everything. Acupuncture/LSD/ultra sound/kiro/physio/yoga had mri’s/xrays/you name it
I had dr. Sarno’s healing back pain for 2 years on my shelf before I took a holiday and read the whole thing in one go. Fell asleep for 4 hours and woke up pain free for the first time in 7 years. Started to come back a few times but I would just read the book again and go for a run. Been smooth sailing for 10 years now.
anyone remember XPDE? I'm not sure it was ever finished / packaged in any major repo but came across someone doing a walkthrough of it the other week and it looked pretty complete.
It is hard for me to distinguish between the functional simplicity of desktop computing in that era, with the overall excitement that the explosion of connectivity brought to the world. The internet was a lot of fun and had so many surprising corners. Practically all of it was personal, niche, or experimental content for awhile.
I wonder if Windows 9X was really all that exceptional, or if it was just what people remember driving with as they navigated the new world.
The best modern equivalent to that desktop paradigm I've found is LXQt, although when I use it I find I kind of miss some of the accouterments of the modern desktops.
The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
interesting to behold this inversion where the "conservative" side is taking dramatic and rapid action, changing things quickly, while the "progressive" side vociferously defends the status quo
It is, the right appears to be playing the same hand the left has for years and the people are supporting it. Naturally this makes someone that has strong left leaning convictions frustrated as they come the realization that they aren't the majority and the numbers of people that support one narrative on the internet aren't a reflection of society as a whole. The bigger picture is this isn't localized, that's how you know it's a larger problem. Countries around the world are having the same discourse and results. People are done with it. Identity politics is over. Spending excess money to support these groups is over.
I get it you’re upset, but that’s a you problem not a we problem. This is what was voted for. To bring it back to the main topic, the implied god mode access doesn’t exist.
Doesn't matter, when the previous admin was in did they take in the considerations of the losing party? Nope. To the victor go the spoils.. of implementing the plan you ran on.
That narrative is so boring and tired, and it's ultimately why Trumpism will be short lived and fade to the dustbin of history.
I'm not a leftist, and I mostly don't care about the groups, the right can have them. I care about things like medical research, nuclear energy and the food supply, which are all at risk because the regime's only tactic seems to be to unplug everything and see what breaks, and then decide if they even want it to work. They're not trying to run the country efficiently, they're trying to punish federal employees.
Most people are like me - they want real solutions for housing and health, not the impotence we get from the neoliberals or the kayfabe we get from Trumpism.
not sure if their policies have changed but in 2021 Amazon Studios implemented quotas for performers and creatives on each project based on race/ethnicity, gender, and ability, with the actor's real-life identities expected to align to their characters. doesn't sound like a compatible platform for this particular franchise.
It's certainly a matter of opinion, but the character's flaws and conflicts are very much tied up in his masculinity. Making the character a woman changes things so much it's essentially a different property with the same name. Just make a good original story about a woman who's a spy, don't ride the franchise's coattails for the wrong reasons. We don't need representation at this level of granularity.
Bond is the embodiment of white male privilege. (I suppose you could add handsome and straight privilege as well.) A well-dressed, handsome, white male with an abundance of confidence can easily gain access to many places without a second glance. Along with seducing women who have information, this is one of his main investigative strategies.
Unfortunately, women and people of color often don't have the same advantages and in some places are completely locked out. This makes it more difficult to change than someone like Leiter, Moneypenny or M who are much more flexible characters.
While it would still be possible to make a Bond without these attributes (they can still drink martinis, shoot bad guys and make quips) it would be a drastic change to the character.
I suppose the other perspective is that if Bond is primarily intended to be a personification of Britain, perhaps it's right that the character looks representative of Britain.
not sure there is a country on earth that you could save your money in the national currency and not watch inflation rip away the value of your earnings. The purchasing power of USD has declined 95% over the past century.
> Your expectation is that the money hidden under your couch should never go down in value?
Why should it go down? If there were a fixed or slowly growing monetary base (i.e. slower than productivity), the dollar would appreciate and this would be a good thing as we would all benefit from the gains of productivity and living in a prosperous society.
I never bought the idea that we need to inflate our monetary base and have inflation. It seems too convenient as the government uses it as a backdoor form of taxation. And every few decades it gets out of control. The argument pro moderate inflation never rang true to me. The biggest one is "people wouldn't spend money if they knew everything will get cheaper", which is on its face wrong because the hottest selling goods in this economy are quickly depreciating. This year's iPhone or car model depreciates very quickly but somehow people keep buying it and the world doesn't fall apart.
You ask why should it go down? My understanding is we tried other banking policy during the great depression and it didn't work out so well. When the economy collapses and the government lacks gold backed dollars to do counter cyclical spending because there's not enough gold reserves it doesn't go well.
So my response would be because great depressions are not desirable.
But what I really don't understand is the outrage that the money under the couch should go down- when assets like treasury inflation protected securities are available. (Yes they are not always available at profitable rates- though they currently are- and I don't think the people complaining about inflation are whining when stocks or Treasuries or bank accounts are paying more than inflation.)
> When the economy collapses and the government lacks gold backed dollars to do counter cyclical spending because there's not enough gold reserves it doesn't go well.
Probably shouldn't be using this logic when the dollar is no longer tied to gold or any other physical asset though. There's a world of difference between a dollar based on gold and a dollar based on confidence in the US government.
And I was saying that the dollar is no longer backed by gold, or tied to any other limited resource, so why would we assume that the same scarcity-driven dynamics are still in play?
Because the people on earth have created value through work and so the money supply needs to increase to represent the additional value that has been created through that work. If you cut a tree down and, through work, turn it into a table — then you created value where there was none before.
So the money supply must increase to represent human endeavour. That’s effectively what central bank interest rate rates are.
In a perfect world, we’d have an exact balance between work/value and money creation. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world.
As others have noted, deflation is problematic because people hoard money with the expectation that the value of the money will be more tomorrow. This reduces the activity in the economy. So a balance between money supply and endeavour is a reasonable solution. It doesn’t make money appear to be rare.
Money is ultimately a 'claim check on society', in Buffet's words. Unspent, uninvested money is a deferred claim. Why should the value of a deferred claim go up, if you haven't invested it in some productive use? Why should you be able to defer a claim in perpetuity, and expect to exchange it for exactly the same amount of goods and services at any point in the future?
Because its a claim. A claim is not less valid if you don't claim it. That kind of defeats the purpose of a claim. You contributed to society and you have a right to something in return.
This argument assumes there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world and you're taking some share that would otherwise go to someone else.
At the time the claim is created (you're paid your salary, you have a liquidity event, ...) you can exchange it for some quantity of goods and services roughly proportional to (the market's appraisal of) the social value you've contributed. If you stash that claim under your mattress, should it be equal to the _exact same_ quantity of goods and services 10 years in the future? 100 years?
If instead you stored the value you created (the lumber you fell and milled, the clothes you manufactured, the messages your software conveyed, the student you educated, ...) under your mattress for 10-100 years we would not expect them to have exactly the same utility they did at deposit
Money should be a _more_ efficient store of value than anything we might exchange it for, but I don't think it's clear that it should be a perfect store of value. If you want to maintain a claim on a fixed quantity of goods and services, you should have to contribute to the investments required to maintain the productive capacity to deliver those goods and services.
A monetary policy targeting stable, low, but positive inflation balances savers' need for a risk-free store of value with the social need for continued investment and consumption.
> A monetary policy targeting stable, low, but positive inflation balances savers' need for a risk-free store of value with the social need for continued investment and consumption.
I think both these purposes are served with zero or deflation. As a saver, I don't like my dollars being depreciated and people on fixed income also don't like that. And as someone who wants to promote investments, a lower deflation rate reduces my minimum expected return since it doesn't have to clear some inflation hurdle rate. And for consumption, like I mentioned in my original post, the hottest selling items are rapidly depreciating, so I don't think it would negatively effect consumption. So the only one the inflationary system works for are the politicians that use money printing as a backdoor form of taxation
Deflation means that I can make money (or more precisely, value) simply by leaving what I have in cash. That doesn't promote investment; it promotes hoarding.
That's the same as investment. If a part of society's resources aren't directed towards consumption, they are directed towards enabling future consumption. It's a tautology in economics that savings equals investment.
It's the same thing in economics. It causes the government to print more money to make up for the money missing from circulation, which will be invested. If the government doesn't do that, it increases the value of all other money in circulation.
But that’s under some weird, incorrect model of how money works. Presumably if we go down this route any further you’ll start talking about IS/LM and the money multiplier. All models are wrong, but there’s a better model that involves capital constraints and the Basel accords.
In any case, one of the major failings of modern macro is to assume you can think your way around the implications of economic actions. You have no way of knowing the consequences of stashing money under a mattress unless you actually do it, and even then there’s no guarantee the effect will be the same across different economies and in different eras. The world is just too complex for that.
care to cite some examples of deflation quickly destroying an economy? there are many such examples for inflation. Argentina, Germany, Zimbabwe, Greece
there is deflation that comes from shrinking of the monetary base
and there is deflation that arises out of productivity gains
often the "deflation" observed in bad economies is a symptom rather than the cause E.g. there were a few months of official deflation in the US following the global financial crisis, but this followed from the crash rather than caused it.
There is a huge difference between "this cash in my hand should never go down in value" (which nobody including the GP is arguing for) and "$1 today has the purchase power of $0.05 a century ago is good, or at the very least the natural state of things" (which you may or may not be arguing, but is how I understood it).
The impact of inflation compounds. I won't bother looking up if that 5 cent claim is correct but I did quickly look up average inflation rate, and the average inflation rate from 1941 to 2017 is 3.5 percent per year. Which would mean the value of the currency would halve every 20 years, but that's just how compound interest works, it's not particularly remarkable or surprising.
Nobody complains when compound interest makes their stocks or bonds go up, I don't know why someone would suggest compound interest in inflation rates is some sort of awful social issue.
I would expect less feudal outcomes in a world that calls itself free. Capital income does not reflect economic performance, its just a inheritable privilege.
Are you upset about seeing those unfortunate suckers, that dont have this privilege maybe coming to your country? Upset, that the world does work this way?
My hot take: currency is not meant to be held, it's meant to be spent. I know, I know: "store of value" is one of its definitions, but it's OK to have short-term and long-term stores of value. Money velocity is a healthy thing for the economy. Hoarding wealth isn't, and besides, everyone with significant wealth is already storing most of it in assets anyway. There's really no reason to want a particular currency to retain its value over 100 years; 1% to 2% inflation is quite healthy. It doesn't rip away the value of your earnings as long as salaries keep up with inflation -- which they don't, but that's the real problem.
1-2% inflation is "healthy" is a trope that nobody really justifies. Perhaps its true, and it is often repeated as gospel. the "2% inflation target" was derived just from the comments of economist Roger Douglas in New Zealand who thought that sounded about right.
We welcome and celebrate deflation in technological goods (cars, electronics), apparel but are constantly warned about the dangers of deflation and why "some" inflation is good.
What is the argument for why 1-2% _deflation_ in housing, education, and healthcare would be bad?
Does nobody really justify it? The argument for inflation is pretty simple I think. It encourages everyone to do something with their money now, invest or spend.
I think that is a valid argument and makes some sense. have to toss the hot potato. The argument for the trade offs are pretty simple I think. It encourages more concentration of wealth in assets and increases the amount of malinvestment.
The question is to what degree. I am saying there's no analytical argument for 2%.
I think most people would agree that 10% or 50% inflation would be bad. But why is 2% better than 1% or 0%?. Why is 1% better than -1%? it depends on the time horizon. higher inflation today will cause more economic activity, higher inflation in the long run encourages debt and misallocation of resources.
Inflation generally encourages economic activity (spend your money before it depreciates) while deflation discourages it (save your money because it will appreciate)
Lower prices are seen as positive for as long as they stimulate higher overall consumption. If prices fall but consumption does not rise, then most economists see that as a problem.
Your main point is the well-established modern consensus among economists, and nicely put. But what makes you think salaries don't keep up with inflation? In the postwar US, they absolutely have kept up over the long term. There are ups and downs depending on the strength of the labor market, and they don't always react instantly to short-term bursts of inflation (as in 2021-22), but over the long term they are steadily up even in the "great stagnation" period of the past 50 years:
Economics is a weird kind of physics that only requires some critical mass of people to believe or act like they believe and then it’s true, so arguing against the 2% ideal for inflation is a bit like debating gravity. From most people’s perspective it just is and understanding much less changing it is an impossible dream.
Whether salaries track inflation is also irrelevant as long as there are markets (like housing/education) that you are basically required to enter, and which have different dynamics. Would it matter if wages and inflation were in lock step if the toilet paper market was wildly out of control? Could people work around this issue by wisely waiting for a better time to use the toilet?
My first point was not that economics as a discipline is infallible, just that this was the opposite of a “hot take.”
Regarding some costs (especially housing) growing faster than the overall rate of inflation: of course they do, just as some grow more slowly or even deflate. The index here is computed based on the average amount people spend on these different categories (the consumer price index), so the need to spend a large share on housing (or toilet paper) *is already included* in the inflation measure.
That’s not a hot take it’s literally the agreed upon monetary policy of the planet.
Only on HN would a bunch of self righteous engineers argue with you about how you are wrong based on some localized wish fulfillment of how a perfect system works in their head.
it was incredibly destructive for trust in the medical establishment to oversell / mandate it and market aggressively as "safe and effective". while most vaccine risks are in the 10s per 100k or 1M, nearly everybody knows somebody else who had an adverse reaction to one of the covid shots.
nearly everybody observed that you still get and spread covid anyway. that is disconnected from the aggressive messaging from the CDC and the fear and shame campaign from the last US administration.
criticism of a specific vaccine or policy does not make someone an anti-vaxxer that moves goalposts. the establishment is responsible for the skepticism it engendered against itself by its hubris