Correct. The AZ vaccine still protected people from COVID-19, but carried more risk than other vaccines for COVID-19. Getting vaccinated is the right move for anyone that had no specific medical condition that made the vaccine more harmful than beneficial, but there's comparative risk, and serious side effects like blood clots are worth weighing if one has a choice of which vaccine to take.

It's not really all that different a concept than the situation with the Polio vaccines. Salk's killed, injected vaccine had the risk of secondary infection from the injection site and a few documented cases where the virus wasn't properly neutralized so it caused direct infection. Sabin's live, oral vaccine did on occasion lead to clusters of Polio outbreaks along with mutation of the Polio virus. Even as someone that hates needles with unbridled passion I'm more favorable to Salk's vaccine. The failure to prepare it properly leading to a few cases of Polio given to patients were very rare occurrences, while Sabin's vaccine lead to far greater numbers of clusters of Polio. But if I had been alive during the Polio epidemic and only Sabin's vaccine was available in my area I wouldn't have refused it.

While I agree with much that you write, I disagree with this.

China is still mostly known for cheap, unreliable crap. Maybe they can make better things (excluding the ones that they simply copied 100%, factory and all, from western companies) but they don't export them. There's plenty of garbage coming out of China, while things "made in Germany" and western brands in general still have a much better reputation.

late-stage capitalism.

Communism self-destructed in the end. I fear capitalism will do the same. And if the fall of Communism teaches us one thing then it is that it can all go really, really fast.

Quite to the contrary, I guess. This is a move out of the "Make China Great Again" textbook.

Sure, short-term there might be a shortage of certain chips. But they'll produce their own in no time, and then even if the political landscape changes and we're all friends again, they won't buy from US companies again.

Frankly with the serious side effects I'm surprised that it wasn't withdrawn from the market sooner, or its sales relegated to places that simply couldn't get vaccines with fewer side effects.

Opportunity costs are a thing.

But yes, as far as bancruptcies go, getting back all your money is a rare event.

That seems to be a huge problem in general, not just in aviation.

I wonder what they teach in those MBA courses, because all that managers ever seem to know is cutting costs. No great product in the history of the world ever came to be because someone was cutting costs. Cutting costs is one small part of running a business. It should be the job of controllers - low-level employees with a knack for numbers - and not the #1 objective of managers.

But late-stage capitalism has led us to this point where innovation has become "I can save 0.5 pennies for each product made if I do this shit idea".

A cult called McDonnell-Douglas management.

I don't know what allowed them to be the ones to essentially take over Boeing, but after the farkup that was the DC-10 it doesn't even make sense.

Its sad, dac/amps make headphones sound so much better. The LG phones had them, but LG is discontinued. Think the Sony and Asus gamer phones have them. Samsung tablets don't have headphone jacks anymore. But entry level samsung and motorola do. So the high end and low end users use wired headphones, but the middle class will gladly buy bluetooth?

Its strange, I can understand replacing sdcards since they could include a TB internally, but most are still cheaping out on internal storage.

But dac/amps are still light years better than bluetooth. I use one in my car to hook up my phone, its louder and better than bluetooth.

For a world with needs/options, removing a simple headphone jack seems very insulting to users.

When employees falsify records, it is *usually* a sign that the company culture actively encourages them to do so. I mean, if it was one bad employee doing it out of laziness when nobody was looking, then maybe not. But if multiple employees were doing it, it's generally because they were being pressured to ensure that the paperwork is filled out a certain way, regardless of physical reality.

> 3 super hero movies a year seems crazy and on top of 2 shows?

That would be excessive, yes.

It is however a small fraction of they've been releasing for the last couple of decades. There's a famous quote from 2019, from a movie director, who said he wanted to make a real movie, and had to sneak it past the studio execs by disguising it as a superhero movie, because that was the only kind they were interested in making. (This is however an exaggeration. They also continued to make pointless movie reboots of old TV shows.)

> I don't follow them (obviously)

I don't generally either; though I will say, the Superman movies that were made in the eighties, had really good music.

> TikTok said that the law violated the First Amendment by effectively removing an
> app that millions of Americans use to share their views and communicate freely.

This is absurd. TikTok is one of the most heavily censored communications platforms in existence, and in any case, freedom of speech protects the right of the people to express whatever opinions they want; it does not protect, and has never protected, the right of a foreign government to do business in America as it sees fit. That fundamentally isn't in the first ammendment's wheelhouse, at all.

However, ...

> It also argued that a divestiture was "simply not possible,"

This, however, is certainly true. Bytedance absolutely can't sell TikTok, because they're not a normal company that has the right to sell whatever assets they possess. The creation of Douyin (of which, TikTok is the English-language version) was sponsored and funded by the CCP, and it's a significant strategic asset; they're not under any circumstances going to allow it to be sold to any entity they can't fully control. Imagine if a foreign government demanded that Lockheed Martin sell the F-22 Raptor to a company in their country. They simply don't have the authority to do that. Which, the real purpose of the bill, at least in my view, was to more publicly *expose* the fact that it's the Chinese government, or the Communisty Party, that controls TikTok and will not allow it to be sold. People who have taken the trouble to educate themselves on the matter are already fully aware of this, but a lot of "narrative shaping" has been poured into making sure _most_ people think otherwise. Hopefully, this bill will allow us to lay that question to rest in the minds of a lot more people, as we see Chinese state-run media responding, and doing things like declaring that the app cannot be sold (which is not something you'd expect a government to declare if the app were a normal asset of a normal private company).

I'm writing as a hobby. Nothing big yet, but 2 published books to my name. I'm writing one right now that I publish chapter-by-chapter on my Patreon. I also make computer games as a second hobby and tried AI voice acting for the dialogs on the one I have on Steam currently.

I wish there were any reasonable AI voice stuff. I'd love to make it an audio book, but my voice acting talents are minimal and of course I'd want different voices for different characters. But all the AI voices I've tried so far are very much lacking. Most of the interfaces don't even give you an option to set markings, you know "a bit louder here", "sound angry", "stress this word". That kind of stuff.

I can't imagine how low-quality all those audiobooks must be.

We're not yet at the point where AI can replace voice acting.

Italy and Japan are both considerably more densely populated than America.

It isn't America as a whole that has too many people. It's certain geographical areas in America, and in particular, certain large metropolitan areas. People who don't have a specific reason to be in cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, and so on, really should consider whether their lives might be better in a somewhat smaller community. In a lot of cases, yeah, they would be, materially. Something for folks to think about. Smaller towns can have a *lot* of advantages.

With that said, not all regulations are equally good. The fire safety regulations we're talking about here, are good regulations, and I'm glad they exist. That doesn't negate the existence of other regulations, some of which are considerably less good.

Yeah, I immediately thought of the Triangle building as well. Although, if I understood the summary correctly, this situation differs in an important way. (Specifically, if I read it right, the residents did have the ability to let themselves in and out; they just had to use a key to do so, presumably due to lack of a proper working push-bar door. That doesn't meet current fire codes, for sure; but the situation in the Triangle building was markedly worse.)