The big difference is the profit motive in the absence of a truly free market.

The big difference is the requirement to test them to make sure they work. It's expensive, and most candidates fail.

This is potentially the biggest strenth of a vaccine approach. According to the Internet the flu vaccine costs my government an average of $5.43 cents. Individuals can get it for under $100 in most parts of the world where you have to pay the full cost. The reason it's not stupid expensive, being a new drug with novel components most years, is because the procedure for making flu vaccines is well known and has a special type of approval that lets new variations be used without extensive trials.

It's not particularly difficult to determine the protein that a bit of DNA codes for. It's more difficult to figure out which of those are going to be reasonable antigens to target, but you don't really have to. Cancer cells aren't unknown pathogens, they're regular old human cells with mutations.

You don't need to do that either though. Cancer mutations aren't infinitely diverse. "Personalized medicine" sounds like a treatment just for you and you alone, and maybe in a Star Trek future it will be, but in the meantime it means a targeted treatment. You'd identify something that occurs in 10% or 1% or 0.01% of a particular type of cancers, make a treatment, and sell that along with a test for that mutation. We've already got several of those based on more traditional immunotherapy. RNA vaccines just make it a lot easier so we'll have lot more options, including ones that target the 1% and 0.01% instead of just the 10%.

It's worse than that. They insist on not selling any bitcoin. So their ability to repay the loan, issue dividends, whatever, depends entirely on their ability to get more people to give them money.

Infinity: I do not think it means what you think it means.

ACs say the darndest things.

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

And soooooo unexpected!

Everything is gambling now.

It's common in English too. The two OPs might be from a particular society that's allergic to multisyllabic words.

A corporation is a legal concept that lets a group of people own property and act together. Many people are expecting AI to replace corporations, especially in software development because one guy with an idea will be able to do what now requires a bunch of shareholders to pool their resources and hire a bunch of specialists.

And then we invented LLMs.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

Yep, pretty much. Not all of them but far too many. And some of the malicious ones are exceptionally loud in addition.

For most people, the LLM is "smarter" than they are because their skills regarding understanding and insight are essentially zilch.

I see the victims of bad tech are, again, out in force and insist the bad tech is actually good tech. How pathetic.