This article must have been written in the few minutes they had between that vote and the one for folks over 65 - which was unanimously approved to get the booster.

The whole reason they rejected the under 65 population is because the data hadn't been reviewed by the larger community of experts yet for that group. Which is absolutely fair.

Just like with the original vaccine rollout, there's just going to be staging steps.

Unless this article was only pushed to give the false impression that the FDA was against boosters... that would be pretty lame.

Ryan Fenton

When the top 1% own about 40% of essentially everything in the US at least, by most measurements.

The top 0.1% in turn own about half of that.

In each case, it's relatively easy for the upper group to hold as much leverage over the others as they desire to. Any game theory would have them holding back only enough to get the maximum amount of work/service/income as they can while still holding maximum leverage over them.

So that's the same game for smaller/bigger companies - get them to do the dirty work, or take advantage of the opportunities you don't find your own employee time... then buy them out when they figure out how to make those limited opportunities work.

The less structure you have in place to prevent that (like unions)... the more than dynamic is going to be the only factor, and the more you grow into a de-facto caste system.

The motivations aren't hard to play out, any way you'd like to simulate it for yourself.

Ryan Fenton

By that, when I say universe, I mean space where direct observation is possible in terms of light, that is the classic observable universe.

If you have a very, VERY large space, you can have multiple 'big bang-like events happening a large number of times, overlapping, so far apart that no light that happens in one is observable in the others before entropy makes all traces of them unobservable - making each a separate observable universe in the same big space.

In most ways, this would act like the universes we see, including background information. Gravity would still slightly attract the spaces to eachother - but not in any way to make direct observation much more likely. But it would mean that the more the observable spaces expand, the faster they would expand from eachother, as parts get more influence from one set of distant universes than others.

Not saying this is likely - but I do think it would be fun to model and test.

Anyone know of a formal version of that theory?

Ryan Fenton

You know - one of the 'duller' versions of cookie clicker.

You create a dummy account.

You pay yourself for $uselessitem.

You create another dummy account.

You pay yourself more for $uselessitem.

You repeat with minimally novel numbers to create a trend and get small-scale web journalists to pick up a press release.

If you're lucky, some real person jumps in, or some larger scale journalists pick on on the story.

It's upscale panhandling, built on scaling markets.

It works because there's such a large percentage of money in worldwide retirement funds than historical norms.

It's so much money, that it can't invest in anything real and get a non-embarrassing percent return on that investment. Not land, not goods, not debt - all the 'good' bits in those markets are already overinflated.

It's a market that absolutely demands scams and illusions of value to satisfy expectations of return.

Now - if it put those resources into creating infrastructure and value that could scale up maximally - then sure, it would benefit everyone and create new markets that could work to satisfy investors better over time - but that's not sexy, and it will lose market managers their jobs in the meantime.

So... scams and illusions hold the value, and fill the news.

Because riding speculation bubbles is pretty exciting. And many larger investors aren't left with much other choice.

Ryan Fenton

There's been two great advancements in human ingenuity and science that have saved more human lives than anything else:

1. Vaccines.

and

2. Fertilizers.

Each of these have saved hundreds of millions of human lives from disease and starvation at the very least, and more every day.

Also each of them is also vilified essentially for being various flavors of unnatural.

But the thing is - these are the things nature is pretty bad at doing on the scale of a human lifetime.

Population level immunity for more deadly forms of disease usually takes out a pretty huge chunk of a population - look at plummeting levels of bat populations (white nose syndrome) - it's not an uncommon arc in historic animal populations well before humans - and we've cured several diseases of that caliber using vaccines instead. Vaccines are outright amazing.

We're going to be curing more diseases, and figuring out how to feed people and maintain our population as we go. Because it's the basis on which we can tell any other story as humans.

It's the story that wishes to throw away all those lives to starvation and disease that makes no sense.

If we are to find a balance with 'nature' - it's going to be with science and increased standards of living. We're already slowing our growth rate to nearly standstill numbers in stable societies. Very few things in the end require disaster and horrific levels of traumatic death to 'fix'.

Try to avoid being on side that demands such, if you can help it.

Ryan Fenton

Advertisement is misinformation.

Or rather, the more honest sorts of advertisement don't pay as well on their particular platform.

Because the more honest companies don't have to pay for people to communicate their information, so they don't output as much money in general.

The other companies make Facebook their bank.

Nothing can be permitted to challenge that logical heart and lifeblood of Facebook.

Oh, and customers willing to sit through openly insulting political dribble make the best marks. Really softens them up to whatever vitamin water someone wants to push - really valuable eyes for the market.

Ryan Fenton

Whenever you have a product or a political party spending all its time trying to imitate the 'leading brand' with no effort at innovation, while also noticing a large percent ownership by that same owners as the leading brand - it's a good indication that the company/party only exists to provide the illusion of competition.

That's sort of been the feeling about Firefox for a long while, since they started cutting large distinguishing features that gave them advantage over Chrome.

I suppose that lack of innovation kind of makes the concept of browsers 'done' for the sake of outside developers though - it just didn't seem to be a legit stopping point in this case.

The only innovations I've seen strike my eye in the last few years have been adverts and lagging adblocking.

Which reminds me of old usenet discussions on the commercialization of the web... and how utterly weird it is to see the droll predictions on how ad companies would be protective about what people would see turned out to basically be the case. Facebook ended up being what CompuServe and the like wanted to be with its ads, but were unable to force customers to accept at the time - and increasingly browsers are trying to force the only option to be to play within those limits.

Ryan Fenton

"If the federation, known as the I.W.F., cannot keep weight lifting on the Olympic program, millions of dollars would be cut off from a sport that lacks major television contracts or sponsors."

So - it's not so much the scandals of the moment, so much that there's no easy predictable form of bribery and commercial interest involved in it.

Covid times are fascinating in a way, aren't they? How the stretched resources in so many ways show us how priorities pan out on a lot of places. Like - how life and death aren't that important to lots and lots of organizations, and traditions will be thrown away along with many lives if only their preferred form of corruption can stand uninterrupted.

Ryan Fenton

I mean, isn't it called the Republican party now?

I understand the reasoning - the theory is that there's always illness, and you shouldn't stop important business because of blah, blah - you get the idea.

But pandemic isn't just disease like normal - and there's big obvious reasons much of the world has serious organizations active to prevent runaway pandemic.

Only, politically - Republicans have major beef against any of those organizations in the US. So... it's political. And it most certainly IS Republicans in this particular case.

Not that Democrats don't have a large swath of idiots in this regard - lots of anti-vax proponents among the California celebrity class and the like. The difference is scale and influence - the "my-body-my-choice" anti-vaxers don't have much sway against actual public health concerns - and will be swatted away pretty harshly in any even minor local outbreak, unable to send children to schools, and lots of similar functional stopping points.

The 'I want to make more money this week, and don't care if it kills my employees" anti-vax movement will not be swatted away in the current Republican party.

Outsider messages trying to sway us to harm are also worth noting and following up on as hostile acts - but aren't that large a factor under the circumstances.

To reference Hitchcock: The killer is already inside the building,

Ryan Fenton

The linked article is useless, since it's a paywalled link.

Editors - you should be rejecting articles that have paywalls.

Ryan Fenton

I don't even want to use any of the TPM-related features, and because I build my own PCs using OEM parts I don't want to bother buying those overpriced modules. Eventually, sure - they'll be more standard - but I don't really want TPM anyway.

I mean, drive encryption is just a bad idea in terms of using resources for what I care about, and I don't particularly want to limit my choices of using other OSs whenever I want.

So long as I can bypass that requirement, I might try Windows 11.

I know the preview version you could bypass it - but I haven't seen any reports of folks using the full version fine without TPM.

TPM doesn't seem like a feature for the user anyway - it's more for admins (and MS itself) to lock down a PC for direct physical access. Not a great requirement for most people.

Ryan Fenton

>>Good post, I appreciate your points. However, don't you find value in the work being done to create a network that can be trusted by transacting strangers and theoretically the cost to use said network (electricity, depreciating hardware, etc.) will become a commodity? Meaning, the protocols being built will result in the network (hopefully) having no ability to be captured by centralized players.

Well, sure - but I think the whole idea of treating cryptography as a form of a 'trust chain' as silly - and especially silly when you're burning resources to build that 'trust'.

Mathematics in this case are being used as a stand-in for an objective basis for trust. And I've worked in several jobs where cryptography was used to secure secrets worth lots of money before - I know where this logic comes from.

But that's not trust. What they're building is not trust - it's a backwards placeholder for trust, built on top of a market system that manufactures fake trust as a matter of course.

None of this is new - the founders of the US at least had to deal with these same issues at the start of this nation at least - these debates and the tools of these arguments are not new at all.

Cryptocurrency is essentially an extension of the idea of a gold standard - in this case, using enough electricity to be worth sort of the value of gold, to be the basis of trust.

But that's a band-aid fix to pretend like you're building real shared trust - a weird kind of trust that never demands trustworthy actions on the part of those participating.

No - it's trusting a made-up inherent value in place of that.

It's expecting that since something is rare, or requires noteworthy sacrifice, or is a bit more popular than a large set of other options - that is is trustworthy.

Which is exactly why I call it fake trust, or a placeholder for trust.

Doge is properly mocking more than a bit of that.

But yeah - it's still wasting a ton of electricity as part of that - and I certainly don't invest in it - but it's a worthwhile example of the set it is mocking - of why they all are absurd.

The larger thing worth mocking is how much shared effort we as a culture put into proposing definitions of value, then going in endless circles sacrificing things to better fit into those definitions, before some crash happens and we redefine value. There's tons of other ideals we all live for - but we're so often willing to see people starve amidst the wealthy for the sake of the ideals of currency and value.

It's kind of a repeating problem - we do need trade systems, and there is real purpose behind such value - but not at the exclusion of so many other crucially important things, like people's lives, and our own shared environment and welfare.

If we're missing anything about the classic debates of the founders of the US now - it's the side arguing for the inherent value of man above monetary value.

Ryan Fenton

Do the people 'promoting' Doge take it in any non-sardonic tone? I'm sure there's some - but not many I've seen at least.

I mean - I'm not much of a cryptocurrency guy - don't trade in any of them - but I recognize the role in the market Dogecoin has - it's the joke currency, just copypasted from the code of other coins.

Like - I'm sure some folks are doing the normal 'pump' part of pump and dump - but that part is a flaw in the market, not in Doge.

Doge is a garbage 'currency'. It's supposed to be. It's also a functional parody of a currency.

Sure - some folks will give a serious 'aw, man' when if the lose 90% of the value when it crashes or whatever - but I don't think many of them don't expect that.

If anything, I think those pushing seriously against it as a target really just don't like meme culture, or youth interests in general - which is definitely understandable and a normal aspect of cultural divides - but kind of the point of the parody is to say that every flaw in Doge is actually a pointed example of what is wrong with investment culture in general.

And again - I roll my eyes at all crypto and most market-based decisions.

None of them are a good way to decide the value of anything in a serious culture. Sure - open trading is part of value - but it's also caused a huge history of crashes and resource shortages over time. It's always needed oversight, since the motivation to play the system is so high, and well rewarded. There's much better ways to decide all of that, in my limited opinion.

In any reasonable culture that cares about a productive future, those motivations should be understood, and obviated in a lot of ways, while still having a healthy trading culture.

But we're so enraptured by the ability to 'play' the most destructive options with the market, that we think of that as the heart of the market, while it's always been the worst part.

So - I'm biased - I'm against crypto and all it stands for, but am interested in a living parody example, and find only targeting that example to be missing the whole point of WHY it is bad, because of what it's showing you.

Ryan Fenton

While I agree with the wish, to be sure...

I somewhat doubt even a large group could pay enough to be worth as much as Google is paying them to sabotage their own product as hard as they have been doing these past few years.

They've been going out of their way to offer anything BUT any kind of a feature that would appear appealing compared to Chrome, instead dutifully playing catch-up with things they'll never really perform better at.

Like a fox knowing it won't outrun a fast dog refusing to ever jump off the path before it, to use its advantages for any actual purpose.

But oh - they sure do like to repaint their interface. Over and over, just stripping off the paint, then applying it again in a new pattern. Such bravery in challenging user expectations too - yes, they're really showing... their user base who's in charge, by following such a path.

Fortunately, there are other forks of the same code. I look forward to seeing what emerges after the 'wisdom' of sticking with Firefox as the most active fork fades.

Just ... I'd suggest nothing with a stock market connection, or that can be invested in for control. Maybe a few such groups to keep eachother a bit more honest and active in open collaboration.

Ryan Fenton

Folks making public decisions wax philosophical about the subject of their day when making analogies in all our history.

Often very flawed ones, dependent on the ideas or misconceptions of their era.

Star Wars is a public touchstone beyond most others, in terms of the percentage of the public that has viewed and discussed it.

And, I mean - the sequels and prequels aren't Highlander 2 bad - but they're in that same ballpark, and you'll even find folks that will at least argue in favor of even Highlander 2.

So... seems as valid as judges musing in their decisions ever is.

I doubt you'd see a successful appeal on that part of the decision, at least.

Ryan Fenton