COVID has leapt from the realm of science and reason into fear and hysteria.
If we 'saved' 1 million elderly people from dying of COVID, and they instead died over a period of time from vaccine side effects, those effects would be impossible to quantify via a binary PCR test and so would be ignored.
Additionally if people were vaccinated, but still died, we could at least say 'oh well, we tried'.
Rushing out a vaccine and giving it to people near the end of their natural lives is a completely legitimate decision to end this hysteria and get back to normal life.
Elderly does not imply "near the end of their natural lives." Consider folks who are about to retire. They're certainly at risk but they still have a whole phase of their lives ahead of them.
I think the inevitable move here is for the EU to enact a maximum % commission for platforms above $1b revenue, at something like 20%. Maybe for sales from that region or for developers in that region.
Unfortunately the EU is going the opposite way - increasing VAT and digital taxes, which are passed straight onto developers.
Except this fight is not about percentages themselves. It's not about whether it's 30%, 20%, 5% or 1%. It's about the fact that there's no free market and that Apple dictates content, prices and censors at their own whim and there cannot be free market competition to them on one of the most popular computing platforms.
Capping the commission does nothing to solve this - opening up a competition when someone else can provide better terms, vetting or different type of content (now deemed unacceptable to Apple political outlook or prudish stance) is the solution.
It also makes Apple actually work harder and start thinking about what ACTUALLY means to build a secure, user respecting OS instead of copping out by randomly rejecting app updates.
Sure, eventually gaming consoles should be opened up. It would allow people to have a free, powerful computer, and save a lot of resources as well as reduce pollution.
Please don't mix up a small market of entertainment devices with a market of computers that half of Americans use as primary communication method with others, primary source of news, primary source of media and many other things. Coincidentally, all of those sources are supervised and censored by Apple having effective control of political and any other messaging for half of countries population.
If that's equivalent to a gaming console then perhaps you need to adjust your comparison algorithm.
You might feel like there is a practical distinction between the two, but for legal purposes there isn't. If Epic wins their case then their theory of Apple's "monopoly" over their own products will also directly apply to Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and any other hardware device where the manufacturer controls what software is allowed to run on it.
Looking forward to when people recognize game consoles and general purpose computing devices that carry an LTE antennae are understood to be different classes of devices with vastly less competition.
On consoles, as far as the majority of consumers are concerned, there’s three players: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. On phones, there’s... Apple, Google, Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus, etc. Sure, it’s basically iOS and Android, but even then, it’s 3 for consoles and 2 for phones. So to say that phones have “vastly less competition” is simply disingenuous.
I don't know about inevitable, but price regulation would not be the best outcome here.
My hope for this is to see regulation that recognizes that hardware, operating systems, application distribution and payment processing are four separate markets and must be unbundled.
That does not mean breaking Apple and Google up or preventing them from providing all these things within an integrated user experience; it should however prohibit:
- using technical or legal methods to prevent consumers from installing any operating system or app store on their hardware, and independent developers from creating such operating systems or app stores.
- using technical or legal methods to prevent developers from using a payment processor of their choice while using Apple's or Google's application distribution service.
I think the judgements against Microsoft in the browser wars might serve as precedent.
The tricky part is recognizing that in two-sided markets, the threshold of market share at which a company achieves a harmful, competition-stifling amount of market power is much lower than in traditional one-sided markets.
No. The solution is to allow third party app stores, and then Apple can keep charging whatever commission they want.
The high commission percentage is not the only issue with Apple's monopoly. It's also that they are gate keepers of apps they don't approve of, they can decide to throw out apps to destroy competition, etc.
To be fair most digital content is still purchased out of app stores so I dont think the developers are the losers there.
Losers are the governments if they cant pay for their healthcare or care for their elderly because all the big internet co's dont pay any taxes for their profits in their countries. A digital tax would at least put pressure on them to take a smaller slice of the pie. Granted, it might be not the optimal solution for the problem.
Europe generates a lot of content, but owns none of the platforms. Lower commissions on those stores would translate directly to higher profits and investment by those content creators, which would be taxed directly and indirectly.
I struggle to see anything Fascist about Donald Trump. I'm significantly more concerned about the role of BLM, woke politics, and the rise of Leftist racism, which is basically part and parcel of modern Democrats.
It's grasping at straws to push the fascist label for Donald Trump. Right-wing populist? Sure. Mussolini? No.
The media didn't pipe up much about Obama who used executive orders like they were going out of style. The mass immigrant deportations, extrajudicial targeted assassinations, etc.
Ok, if it's not a matter of quantity, surely it's indisputable that Obama normalized the idea that if Congress "fails to act" it's completely fair game to break the rules and legislate from the oval office.
Maybe off by a president or two - Bush started breaking the rules by making all his judicial appointments between sessions as 'emergencies' to avoid Congressional oversight.
The point of 5G is to allow carriers to serve more data with the same amount of spectrum. Usually that leads to consumer benefits in the form of a cheaper rate per megabyte. That's basically it.
I disagree. I think the purpose of 5G is to allow carriers (formerly known as The Phone Company) to sell value-added services to other companies large and small. IoT, video-on-demand, Big Data, AI, automation, etc. The bandwidth story is the distraction.
I think the term is more use cases rather than value added services.
Parts of the 5GC specifications such as URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication) allow for far more safety critical solutions to be back-hauled over a mobile network. Autonomous driving, critical industrial control systems and remote surgery solutions are some I've seen.
Even standalone 5G networks are now specified, they use unlicensed spectrum and give you the freedom to not even include a carrier in the equation at all.
IoT devices are cheap and tiny and so are rarely on the latest cellular standards. Your typical IoT use case is smart metering and logistics - hardly big data users.
In most of those other use cases, the carrier serves as basically a big dumb pipe.
Yes and the cost models are being driven down even more by Cat-M and NB-IoT.
I've been working in the IoT space for some time and there's now a real shift into these technologies for large scale telemetry deployments like you described. The shutdown of 2G networks across the world have ruled out a lot of the cheaper modems.
There are other benefits, such as enabling a larger set of solutions to be battery powered and for an increased lifespan.
High density, sparse traffic solutions like you described are often termed as mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communications). The main benefits to 5G in these regards focus on the mobile network and their ability to manage a higher volume of subscribers and therefore lower their costs to the end customer.
In newer LTE standards there is LTE-M, which is a special lower power mode. So while they are not big data users they do benefit from lower power usage.
Even without LTE-M, devices that will use LTE will be more power efficient
That story was the same for 3g and 4g. And why would they want to sell ‘IoT’ to ‘other companies’ while the poor consumers foot the bill? That’s just conspiracy theory.
It also allows wireless providers to directly compete with cable for home internet access. It could also help in many rural areas that still lack cable.
The EU is not a great place for innovation, period. Here are the major problems:
1. No common language
2. Incredibly high taxes, particularly sales taxes
3. Unfinished transition out of Communism in many Eastern Countries
4. Preference for cheap illegal labor instead of automation
This could be solved by:
1. Formalising an 'EU English' language so that schools teaching it can open up around the continent and families can move from one country to another without having to pay for extortionate international schools
2. Eliminate payroll taxes, limit sales taxes to a maximum of 10%. Deport all illegal immigrants (who are huge burdens on the State and society) and raise pension ages to 70 in order to save money. Limit bachelor degrees to the top 20% of the population and Master's degrees to the top 10%, to encourage people into the workforce earlier in life. Raise taxes on land and pollution.
3. Limit EU funding for countries like Bulgaria that have not transitioned to modern Democracy or Bureaucracy.
4. Withdraw from the UN convention on refugees, deport all illegal immigrants, pay and help North African countries to guard their own coastlines, and replace migrants with robots and automation.
This will immensely boost the living standards of the average European, but hurt bureaucrats and old-money.
Immigration is NOT the issue.
Corrupt government and corporatocracy is.
With all those subsidies going to
coal, oil, cars, planes and whatnot, we could pay and educate all the immigrants a thousand fold, and make them a super producive labour force.
You're gonna be a kick ass employee if you're motivated enough to risk your life and travel for years, for education and a better job.
The economic migrants that have travelled to Europe illegally are mostly illiterate and with few skills. They are consistently borne out to be at the bottom of society and over-represented on welfare rolls and jails. Essentially they will form a permanent underclass in Europe and a forever burden.
They come into Europe to work on huge farms owned by wealthy Europeans. Here is an example - essentially all of the manual labour in these towns is illegal:
Without these workers the production would be automated and picked by robots (providing jobs for European engineers, technicians, developers). When you can pay someone $2/hour, with their lives subsidies by the taxpayer, there is no justification for robots.
The most dastardly action performed by the ruling class of Europe is to bring in millions of exploitable workers and claim they are doing it on the basis of human rights.
Sure, it's not like the current lines of conflict haven't existed for hundreds of years or anything. This reductionist mentality is really starting wear thin.
Repeated mentions of deporting illegal immigrants and withdrawing from the UN convention on refugees are typically only found in ultra-right-wing party programs in Europe.
The simplest explanation for Madrid is that it locked down too early, and herd immunity (which seems to occur at about 20-25%, based on Antibody testing of New York and Sweden) was never reached.
Lockdown also seems to increase the threshold for herd immunity and increase deaths, by dramatically changing the demographics of who is infected. Without lockdown, the youngest and most mobile people are likely to be infected - with minimal/zero deaths since COVID mortality is incredibly age dependent.
Under lockdown, those people are at home and intermingling with family. The only 'social' activity is shopping for food, leading to an unnatural mingling of old and young.
I live in Ukraine which has masks and little else against COVID. In shopping centers particularly in the evenings there are essentially zero old people - they fear for their lives, as they should.
The most effective policy we could have adopted was 6AM-10AM public transport and shopping for the aged only, and everyone else from then on. Segregate the elderly population into the mornings and let the masses in in the afternoon. This might have required shifting school and work to later hours in the day for three months, which seems a minor inconvenience.
Nobody credible believes 20-25% is a likely threshold for herd immunity. You cannot Realistically in America isolate the old from the young and if the young spread it like wildfire the old get sick.
Literally everything in your post is as poorly considered. It's important not to spread misinformation.
It's 20%-25% of currently detectable antibodies, coupled with another 20%-50% from prior coronaviruses or other cross-immunity. That's the important distinction. The sum approaches the 50%-70% needed for herd resistance based on 1-1/R0. That's the point of this article.
In addition to immunity based on T cells, the HIT depends on how individuals are networked. The original 60-70% estimates were based on 100% of people being vulnerable and also a random distribution of individuals interacting. In reality a small fraction of the population will have many interactions and once they become immune those transmission vectors away and the average R number drops. So based on the latest research plus observations of the worst hit places, 20-25% seems plausible.
Your data actually says the opposite for Europe - it's highly dependent of the country of course, but if you look at page 6, in Southern countries - Spain, Italy, you have >30% of old people living with larger family (columns 'living with partners plus others' and 'no partner, not living alone'). That comes out at <10% for Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden etc)
Three-generation house-holds or households where adult children live with their older parents are very uncommon in most, but not all, EU countries.
The numbers you cite are explained by old people living in retirement facilities or coliving arrangements, but that doesn't imply cohabitation with young people. Under these circumstances, special precautions can and must be taken.
You are paying for your Dad's pension, and for the Government services consumed by millions of migrants.
Those same migrants increase labor supply (thus lowering the equilibrium price) and increase demand for land and real estate.
The end result is high taxes and high real estate cost. Of immense benefit to your dad (and other Baby Boomers) who receive risk-free pensions, and supercharged capital gains for their own assets.
The missing component is the need to integrate Electric Vehicles into the grid on a fundamental basis including selling electricity.
We need a technical, regulatory and user regime to support this. For starters, by transmitting power demand/price information to cars so they can decide when to charge, and also allowing cars to deposit electricity back into the network.
If we manage this smartly, we can have battery storage and EVs in one go.
Yes, exactly! A Tesla-size battery is three days' of electricity use for many people's homes.
So we will be building massive amounts of storage as we shift our car fleet to electric (though personally I hope that we can massively cut down on car use too, due to the amount of PM2.5 pollution even EVs cause. The biggest source of microplastics in CA is tire road wear, not plastic bags or straws, yet the idea of reducing car travel is faaaaaar outside the Overton window even as we try to ban single use plastics.)
I think there's lots of room for demand response, both in terms of pre-cooling houses or pre-charging batters. But I would love to be able to power my house with the 50amps that my car battery could provide. If you're only taking a couple kWh at peak times, it has nearly an effect on battery longevity and could provide great value to both the grid and user if price signals could be used in an automated fashion.
For a model that won't scale to the general population, OhmConnect in CA will pay residences to reduce usage at certain hours, averaging about 6 hours per month for me. During the recent CA high load days, I made about $50 with minimal action on my part (used all the normal lighting, etc. just didn't run the dishwasher or clothes dryer during that period).
EVs still have tires, and though regenerative braking is far better than using brake pads, at low speeds and frequent braking that occurs in congestion and city driving forces EVs to use brake pads.
This is the source of fine particulate matter, reported as PM2.5 in air quality, that results in ~50k premature US deaths per year [1] [2].
Tire particulates are the major source of oceanic microplastics off the CA coast [3]. Tire manufacturers produce tires that produce fewer particulates and last longer and are more expensive upfront, but which have a lower total cost of ownership. [4]
Sorry for the big leap, I accumulate all these news bits by trawling deeply in a few narrow topics, and forget that they are not common knowledge and often obscure.
We'll struggle to address this until we get the global population under control, particularly in the 3rd world where regard for the Environment is much lower than in the West.
At least in the West, we can phase out beef, coal, and oil; as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
>as well as dramatically limiting immigration (accepting migrants only from other highly developed countries, deporting all illegal immigrants, and ceasing all permanent refugee programs) in order to limit overall population growth.
Those people won't cease to exist. They'll just stay in poorer nations. In fact, wouldn't accepting them into a wealthy nation reduce the average number of children they have? And if these nations can drastically reduce the impact of their citizens, all the more reason to start recruiting migrants.
The reduced number of potential children is offset by the significantly higher net increase in emissions from moving from a poor country to a rich country, and participating in a more CO2-intensive economy.
Unskilled migrants and refugees move to the West for economic reasons. However, their labor can increasingly be replaced with robots. Additionally, in Welfare states, their existence is a cost on the rest of society, as well as increasing demand for finite land and transport infrastructure, thus worsening quality of life for existing citizens.
With all of that, it would be much more effective to provide free and universal education, contraception, and abortion for women, which will also address the underlying cause of mass migration and habitat destruction - regional human overpopulation.
