I would argue that these new regulations are in a way a breach of the Fourth Amendment, which is supposed to protect people from unreasonable searches.
Generally, health care workers and those most at risk are being granted early access.
From a public safety perspective, I wonder if perhaps those most likely to spread the disease should be the first to be innoculated rather than those most likely to have a bad outcome.
I’ve heard this argument before, I’m still convinced that covering at-risk groups first is the best idea. Even if it still continues to spread for months, we can bring the deaths way down, and give our isolated elderly generation a much-needed opportunity to see family and friends.
>From a public safety perspective, I wonder if perhaps those most likely to spread the disease should be the first to be innoculated rather than those most likely to have a bad outcome.
The argument is that the vaccine has not been proven to prevent infection and spread. Only to prevent severe disease in those who do get infected. So administering it to those with comorbidities, for now, is the most effective means of reducing overall mortality based on known evidence.
That's technically true, but I'd be really surprised if vaccinated people didn't spread it less...so surprised that I'd argue it's a risk worth taking.
The US has currently purchased enough vaccine for 50 million people (100 million doses). Further doses from Pfizer are not expected until around June because of obligations Pfizer has to other countries.
Within the US, each state will be allocated vaccines in proportion to their population. Each state is then responsible for deciding how to allocate them. You can look for your state here [0]
Logisticly speaking, the plan [1] is for Pfizer to ship vaccines directly to the point of use, using custom containers featuring dryice, thermal sensors, and GPS. These containers can passively maintain temperature for up to 10 days.
Once at the point of use, the vaccine can be stored for up to 6 months if a suitable freezer is available.
Without a ultra low temperature freezer, the vaccine can be stored in the Pfizer container used for shipping for up to 30 days, provided the dry ice is replaced regularly.
Standard refrigerators can store the vaccine for up to 5 days.
The US passed on an opportunity to secure up to 500 million additional doses despite warnings from Pfizer. [1]
> Accounts differ over the timing of the discussions between Pfizer and federal officials about locking in extra doses. Several people said that during late summer or early fall, Pfizer officials repeatedly warned the Trump administration that demand could vastly outstrip supply and urged it to pre-order more doses, but were turned down.
The US also has at least a couple hundred million doses lined up of Moderna's vaccine. Their request for an emergency use authorization was submitted 10 days after Pfizer's so hopefully will be approved before Christmas.
There aren't enough customers to justify building something like Starship, so SpaceX created their own biggest customer with Starlink.
They are also hoping to provide Earth-to-Earth passenger service to compete with airlines on long distance routes, which would be orders of magnitude more launches than any other use. It seems quite unlikely that they could compete on safety though.
Not enough customers yet - if they can get it working its just a total money printer. Orbital refueling, tourism, cheap microgravity research, manufacturing and material processing or even early solar farms and habitats!
Or you might even just start by launching 20 tons of coffee beans, roasting them in orbit and selling them as "Space Coffee" - it migh still be worth it with the per launch costs they have mentioned.
DOD is already talking to SpaceX for rapid cargo transport applications.
“A military team is working with SpaceX to flesh out the prospect of shipping routes that pass through space, the head of U.S. Transportation Command said Oct. 7.”
“That group could demonstrate as early as 2021 whether quickly sending cargo around the globe via space is feasible, Army Gen. Stephen R. Lyons said.”
“Think about moving the equivalent of a C-17 payload anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” Lyons said at a National Defense Transportation Association event. “Think about that speed associated with the movement of transportation of cargo and people. There is a lot of potential here.”
Isn't that going to trigger icbm monitoring systems? NASA works in concert with hem and schedules, etc., but military use that needed readiness like this seems like it would be asking for accidents.
This is a very good point. If transportation through space becomes routine, does that affect the ability to detect nuclear first strikes, and what does it do to the calculus of mutually assured destruction?
Hopefully this can be solved with comparable improvements in monitoring and/or adjustments to second strike capabilities.
ICBMs are far smaller and designed to travel far faster than any rocket carrying people would presumably go. It doesn't seem likely they could be easily confused.
MIRV warheads are smaller than regular nuclear warheads. The launch platforms for MIRVed nuclear warheads are the same as those for regular nuclear warheads. But on a MIRV, instead of one regular nuclear warhead there are multiple small nuclear warheads.
I'm thinking of things like r36m, but I guess it is used for non-mirv too. Warhead size is irrelevant as they use Mylar radar decoys or something right? Those can appear as any size so I was focusing on the launch vehicle size for monitoring.
Speed may be a differentiator like you originally said, I'm not sure if they need to end up around the same speed anyway for reentry or not (ones targeting high altitude blast for EMP maybe don't need to reentry at all?).
Anywhere on the globe in less than an hour... plus months of planning and days of preparing the launch vehicle. How fast can one "scramble" a Starship off the ground?
I assume fast turn around times from the Boca Chica (Texas) spaceport. Pick whichever Starship SN is refreshed and ready to go. Less Space Shuttle, more Southwest Airlines. Vehicles on the ground are vehicles not generating revenue.
Given the drone ship landings of the Falcon first stages, I wonder: could you land a Starship on a US aircraft carrier?
And the obvious next question: given Musk is happy to take ship names from pop culture and sci-fi, might he name one of the Starship vehicles “Enterprise”, and could the Starship Enterprise land on the USS Enterprise (CVN-80)?
The cost is likely to fall in the 1%-3% range of that of a C-17. The War Department could buy 100-200 of them for the cost of 2 C-17 Globemaster IIIs.
I would be interested to see if some form of portable, quickly constructed landing pad could be deployed, much like the mats used as runways during WWII.
Do they need a landing pad? They have to be capable of landing on unimproved martian or lunar rock, with enough spare capacity for either the fuel for a return flight (from the moon) or a local fuel generator (from Mars).
That should work, but it will likely not be able to safely launch again even if you managed to refuel it.
The engine power needed to launch in Earth gravity, even with a small hop fuel load might be too much for engines so close to the ground & with thick atmosphere preventing the exhaust from dissipating.
Oh... I forgot about the noise from launch, which is loud enough that echos could damage the vehicle if not damped.
Some form of tower to stand off the exhaust would be required.
So, the one way cost to get a C-17 full of cargo anywhere in the world is about $500,000
1 Million round trip.
I had the cost wrong, I thought it was per vehicle, it's per launch... $2,000,000. If it could fly back, it's only $4,000,000 per round trip.... just 4 times the cost of a C-17 delivery and return.
A C-17 load that doesn't require a ground stop in a foreign country or a tanker based in another country to refuel that same cargo plane. Advantage indeed.
Realistically this means Orbital DropShip Trooper as a role designation is probably 10-20 years out. Launch a Starship, kick out the drop pod "over" the target and then coast suborbital to landing zone (or go orbital and return to launch site).
A one-hour deployment capability anywhere in the world would revolutionise special forces.
Yuri Gagarin technically performed the first “orbital drop” style manoeuvre if you want to get into the semantics. The Soviets were concerned about the efficacy of the landing systems and made the decision (and designed the capsule to facilitate this) have him egress the and parachute to a nearly guaranteed safe landing rather than accept the risk of his death in an accident on landing.
Government's argument rests on the fact that Visa shouldn't acquire Plaid because of the potential technology they might create. This is a really dangerous argument.
This is a direct quote from the plaintiff's argument:
"While Plaid’s existing technology does not compete directly with Visa today, Plaid is planning to leverage that technology, combined with its existing relationships with banks and consumers, to facilitate transactions between consumers and merchants in competition with Visa. Like Visa’s online debit services, Plaid’s new debit service would enable consumers to pay for goods and services online with money debited from their bank accounts."
I'm not a lawyer nor an expert in payments but this seems like a stretch to me.
What is “dangerous” about it? It isn’t as if the DOJ is the one speculating as to what the motive is or was, it’s that they have specific evidence of communication between Plaid and Visa that spelled out Plaid’s plan to basically “scare” Visa and Visa’s concern of their plan.
This feels like one of those situations where two parties were so conspicuous is making an anti-trust case that the DOJ could not do anything but prosecute.
I believe the word 'dangerous' has developed a new meaning; roughly "this doesn't align with my personal politics." Whatever my politics happen to be are assumed by me to be best for society, and consequently anything that doesn't go my way threatens to harm society. For instance, if I were a libertarian I might think that attempts to regulate corporations would create inefficiencies that would harm society by harming the economy. Or if I were a social democrat, I might think that failure to regulate corporations will harm society by letting corporations run rampant on people. In either case, very sure of my own beliefs, it seems self evident to me that those who disagree with me present a danger to society.
That is, unless, I have the humility to earnestly be cognizant of the possibility that I could be wrong about what I believe. If I have that humility, I might choose to temper my criticism of others.
The problem is that the Visa CEO allegedly believed the potential technology was coming soon, and allegedly told the Board of Directors to acquire Plaid so Visa wouldn't have to compete with its new technology. If the Justice Department were just randomly speculating, that'd be a different story.
- Plaid is hardly alone in its competitive space. Even if Finicity sucks and SynapseFi is mid-implosion, they don't have a corner on capabilities like this indefinitely. MX is pretty alright.
- That ignores FANG platforms that could implement similar money-moving features.
- Stripe trotted out their "Banking as a Service" APIs today.
- Let's not forget the Chinese giants that have obviated the day-to-day need for credit card networks in their country, whose strategists (and imitators) are eyeing global markets.
If Visa's approach to this competitive threat is really acquire-and-kill, I hate to break it to them but... not even they can afford it. With all the innovation and competition in the space, best case scenario is that they bought themselves a year. And it turns out that, oops, Plaid wasn't even the closest. Stripe was.
The case for monopolistic harm is slim. Even if there was monopolistic intent, it was probably incompetent.
Plaid is still (for some unknown reason) the only company that is able to do real time ACH transactions that bypass credit card companies in the US. All other companies still require long verification processes or high transaction fees.
Plaid doesn’t do ACH transactions, someone else does, e.g. Stripe, or Dwolla. They merely provide a means to verify account details instantly per NACHA rules.
Plaid is planning to do ACH payments themselves and have a private beta.
They basically guarantee the funds to the merchant and reduce the likelihood that the cash won’t be there. The other side of the coin is providing insurance against fraudulent charges. This only really matters where physical goods are exchanged.
Can you share a link of the new service by the Fed? I wanted to show it to somebody, but I don't know what it's called so it doesn't turn up on Google.
Good point. I guess that a key assumption of most strategies is that the world's economy will continue to grow. The condition is to wait long enough to see it through without panic selling.
...to promote economic growth and upward mobility...
I've always thought that upward mobility is what gives hope and hope is the fuel of persistence. Persistence coupled with patience and passion makes it possible to grow economically.
But what does upward mobility look like without economic growth? Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top, or resource distribution must become more egalitarian, at the expense of the better-off. From that I'd argue that upward mobility is enabled by economic growth.
Well, maybe there is another option. Call it "inward mobility". It is where your life becomes better, more organized, more healthy, within the bounds of, e.g. your energy expenditures or your draw on natural resources. There is an analogy with racing: in drag racing, you always want to go faster and faster, with no upper bound. But there is another form of racing, rally racing, which hinges on precision and control rather than raw speed.
My recent experience living in Germany gave me a real sense of what that's like. There is a cultural affinity for "progress means innovation aimed at ever more closely and efficiently adhering to a standard". So this means, for example, the beer in Germany is very consistent over decades, sometimes centuries, is cheaper than soda, and there isn't much variety. (a similar story for Ireland's Guiness, BTW). Or take the German knife maker Wüsthof, which unusually for a large knife maker uses entirely one steel, one style of blade, across the line (okay there are exceptions but these are rare). They've fixed the larger values of a boundary condition, but still find room to innovate within that space. I can't help but think that this is a healthier way to think about progress and growth, rather than the very American approach that progress always means more, but never just better.
This sentiment coincides with the problem of measuring "the economy".
The major notions we have inherited of economy derive from the rentier merchants of early modernity. They took to the idea of seeing a nation as a balance sheet, a tabulation of assets: men, ships, iron. From this idea we get the idea of putting more assets on the balance sheet through trade and colonization, rather than tribute. This lasted a few centuries, but by the point of transition to an industrial economy it had already become clear in the writings of Enlightenment philosphers that it was not quite as simple as possession and accounting of the raw assets, but their organization too. The gross product and employment figures we started using to measure organization generalized things, but also suffer from limited scope - if it's not a money transaction, if the work is unpaid, it's outside "the economy".
In the long 19th century it was very straightforward to devise ways to purpose inventions towards economic benefit: take an existing trade, buy up more raw materials through the canals and rails, run it through the factory, sell more product. With the second industrial revolution, another "wave" of products appeared that substituted common uses of labor: canned food instead of fresh, telecommunication instead of express mail, and an increasing number of mechanized devices.
It got much harder in the 20th century as more of the inventions relied on developing consumer habits and did not reflect a traditional trade. The dilemma was averted through marketing techniques: Everyone uses toothpaste and shampoo, watches the new television show, and desires a new car, a bigger house and a higher-paying job. Creative financing ideas took up the rest of the slack, allowing consumers to get their hands on the stuff and set lifestyle expectations that are higher than reasonable.
So, by the early 21st century everyone simultaneously has too much "stuff", is unhappy because of the marketing, and is in debt because of the financing. But GDP is higher, so the system persists, up until now.
That trend makes me think that "building" is at an end, and something more like the German system has to take hold. America's consumer economy is now developing a multitude of niches, marketed through various online storefronts, Kickstarters and viral video. Appreciation of the best stuff of past years has risen as more of that material surfaces online and rubs shoulders with "new" stuff. Where this emerging system struggles the most, it can usually be traced back to the old power structures and their large footprint on the economy. And to a great degree the measure of the economy is tied to those structures: growth and employment figures feed into the taxation and spending model. Change the measure and you have to realign what it means to tax or to spend, who is in debt to whom. It's not done so easily.
Thanks for that very nice comment. Interestingly, I think software has huge potential for "inward mobility"! Consider the fact that the basic screen/memory/cpu/battery combo has been around for ~10 years, but I believe we've only begun to discover what these devices can do, and most of what we've discovered has been funded by precisely that old guard - and so there's been a bias toward centralization and, dare I say it, rather unscrupulous use of information asymmetry and moral hazard to produce systems that are superficially great for people, but are rotten in their cores. It's not all bad since this money has explored a lot of useful UI/UX space, but...I really believe that there remain huge improvements to people's quality of life once they take ownership of these infinitely mutable devices and start organizing that enormous data-space for their own benefit.
Assuming it is a 0-sum game is a mistake. The rich can stay rich and yet other people can rise above, if we build more and more elaborated structures, and in fact, this is a goal. The 0-sum game only exists if we keep the same structures, science, tech, governance and social hierarchies.
About this, 86% of today’s billionaires didn’t have billionaire parents. The elites were surprisingly well renewed for our generation.
Some people would want the social elevator to work from -1 to +100 in one generation, this is unrealistic and wouldn’t even be wise because it takes a lot of knowledge to manage large groups of people. But if the top 40% can threaten the top 1% at each generation, and the bottom 60% threaten the top 40% in a single generation, then we’ve made it, we’ve given power to people who will need to keep working if they want to stay atop, and they’ll be accountable, and this is the important part.
> Either there must be corresponding downward mobility to make room at the top..
Assuming the population remains mortal, there will be a steady stream of vacant positions at the top and plenty of room for individual growth, even without overall economic growth.
The important thing is not generalized upward mobility, but the hope of individual upward mobility. An economically stagnant society where anyone has a solid opportunity to better themselves and where no one is in a very bad nor hopeless situation would provide this well enough.
Hope is fueled by depravation. When someone is experiencing hunger, cold, loneliness, sexual unfulfilment or lack of a sense of meaning, the possibility of improvement in those areas can be an extreme force. This can cause people to be willing to face severe risks to improve their situation.
This is what makes "hope" so dangerous, since the risky things people are willing to do can be quite destructive to themselves and others.
If people are already content, fear tends to be stronger than hope. This comes with its own downsides, of course. People become passive, and society becomes stagnant and eventually corrupted due to lack of rejuvinating forces.
As you say, a balance is needed. Some needs must require some positive effort in order to be fulfilled. But if only the most anti social and ruthless get their needs fulfilled, society breaks down even faster.
