It's amazing how hitting the record button makes you self aware. Even if it's just yourself in the room.
It can also be a mood killer when rehearsing with a band. Everyone is messing about and having fun, then suddenly REC ON! and everyone is almost dead serious in performance mode.
The point is not exactly product cycles, but some way to track progress. Jane street also tracks progress and for many people it's the direct profit someone made for the firm. For some it is improving engineering culture so that other people can make better profits.
The problem with safety is that no one knows how to track it, or what they even mean by it. Even if you ignore tracking, wouldn't one unsafe AGI by one company in the world nullifies all their effort? Or safe AI would somehow need to take over the world, which is super unsafe in itself.
Well I’m not saying I agree with it, but a comparison to the Great Depression is not out of context for an article comparing today’s economic situation to that immediately preceding the Great Depression!
Do the private companies get some special IP rights on the public sector research? It seems like in a competitive market, those private companies would have thin margins. What stops a lower cost competitor from using the same public IP? I’m clearly missing something important here.
I suspect that's due to the misleading nature of the 'public research, privitized profits' trope. The reality is that publically-funded biomedical (for the lack of better word) science does not generate anything production-ready.
Academia produces tens of thousands of papers per year; many of these are garbage, p-hacking or low value - the rest are often contradictory, misleading, hard to interpret or just report a giant body of raw-ish data. It is a very valuable process - despite all the waste - but the result of this is too raw to be actionable.
This body of raw 'science' is the necessary substrate for biotechnology and drug development - it needs to be understood, processed, and conceptualised into a hypothesis (which most likely fail) strong enough to invest billions of dollars into.
Pharmaceutical industry is the market-based approach to prioritising investment into drug development (what is it, 100B$ p/y?) - and even a leftist who might want to debate in favour of a different economic model would have to agree that this job is hard, important, and needs to be done.
I lived in Argentina for a few years. There are plenty of problems with their public healthcare system that pretty much mirror any country with a troubled economy, but one day a work colleague recommended I visit the Favoloro Institute. I’ve never seen such an impressive healthcare organization in my life.
They time their appointments ever 2 minutes so you’re expected to arrive early. Once you start, they wiz you around to about a dozen tests including getting hooked up to electrodes while running on a treadmill. After less than an hour you see a doctor who goes through everything for about 15 very detailed and thoughtful minutes.
The entire thing is FREE! Completely publicly funded.
I don’t know much about healthcare but this type of thing always struck me as a missing apparatus of healthcare in the US. Although apparently Favoloro (who invented some kind of bypass surgery) founded the Institute after being inspired by the Cleveland Clinic.
Would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this because I tell that story all the time!
Interesting. I too lived abroad in argentina for a few years... the healthcare there is actually pretty impressive. I had my tonsils removed, I had a crown put on my molar, dermatolgist appointments, etc. Even a podatrist and custom orthotics... From now on... anything major - I am flying back to get things done.
> I don't know how effective it is, and how much of it is theater.
They may not know either.
Most of our research is studying how well treatments work on "patients that came in with _____ symptoms and we found test X Y and Z was outside of the normal range".
Does that mean you should use the same treatments when you have X Y and Z out of range but without symptoms? We often don't know.
Interesting. I was considering commenting that your experience sounds a lot like the VIP (using the term loosely here, it's much more accessible than "multi-millionaire") care available at the Mayo Clinic. You can accomplish in a day or two what would typically take months to years in many areas of the US, including mine.
This sounds much like the annual health check-ups that are done here in Japan. They're paid for by your employer, and involve a battery of tests on many things: blood work, stool/urine samples, chest x-ray, abdominal ultrasound, hearing and eye checks, etc.
If you study history you’ll notice that groups and their leaders are rising and falling, conquering and pillaging and then losing it all. The world is too dynamic for your reductive theory to fit in.
Elites compete with each other. They don’t sing kumbaya and cooperatively share the keys to power.
I agree, and the world is dynamic, it's just not as dynamic as especially american collective consciousness would have you believe.
There is very little social mobility, wealth transfers very solidly between generations at the absolute top and organisation around PR and Politics is tightly integrated in this class.
Off course you can always fall from grace, but that does not in any way diminish the collective power of this class. That's why it's called a class and not a "person" or one singular family or group of people that clownish conspiracy theories would have you believe.
A good primer to the historical context could be this new book from Cambridge: "The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity".
Elites have always formed tightly knit clubs that most couldn't get into.
This is not a reductive theory, it's based on solid academic research on wealth transfer and academic books like the one above.
It's a almost like a biological or physical property of advanced civilizations - like social patterns seen emerging in larger groups of monkeys, or a precursor to the labour divisions seen in ant hives - there's clear distinctions set fourth for an individual at birth or because of location or family, and no amount of ideology is able to change this unless very, very lucky - this is mirrored in the social mobility data.
While they will absolutely backstab each other given an opportunity (see the VCs who caused a bank run that primarily affected other VCs), they do seem pretty chummy. Davos is quite literally the summit of the elites.
But is the summit "let's all get together and stomp on the poor while holding hands", or is it just another high stakes poker game to show off who's winning or losing, making alliances and seeing who talks to who?
Not sure why you were downvoted. Parts of the book are indeed timeless!
My favorite but is the idea that out of the jumble of documents produced, a few emerge as the pivot around which the majority of the team’s communication revolves.
I’ve seen very effective project leads use this to great effect. Rather than robotically using boilerplate document templates they discover the most precise format for the project at hand.
So relatable.
Congrats, looks like a great product. I just ordered one for my piano-player buddy for Christmas.