>The whole idea of AI to do a review is just plain stupid - ethics, morals, integrity, and intellectualism aside.

It's a bad idea for processing new information. It may be a good idea for quickly catching the following:
- Plagiarism
- Regurgitation (unintended plagiarism).
- Folks using AI (simply a restatement of the above points)

If you tasked AI with the above, you'd have more mental bandwidth to do a quality review.

It seems that Germany is in a bind because of anti-nuclear fundamentalist.

They moved from coal to natural gas because it was the only way to make some kind of dent in their carbon emissions. Unfortunately for them the only natural gas available is in Russia. The idea they can import it from other regions via the oceans without mysterious 'accidents at sea' is comical.

Energy is at the heart of most of the wars for the last 2 centuries. The only responsible solution for energy security is for each nation to manage this, just like water. The only real low-carbon solution is nuclear energy.

Here's the game plan for Germany to obtain responsible energy security without relying on Russia:
1 - Re open all of the coal plants you just shut down. Don't worry about emissions - this is temporary.
2 - Work on a crash national-emergency program to develop closed-fuel-cycle nuclear power plants (no waste, reprocessing). The technology is a least 50 years old (nuclear subs/aircraft carriers). This requires no imaginative breakthroughs.

The only problem with a closed-fuel-cycle nuclear power plant: the intermediate presence of weapons-grade plutonium.

The solution:
1 - 'Closed fuel cycle' means 'closed', as in no need to build access to the core. The only access possible should involve effort (i.e. a security breach and explosives).
2 - You don't have to guard against the above indefinitely - just long enough to detonate the reactor, providing any terrorist with a free 'nuclear tan'.
3 - When I say 'detonate', I don't mean placing the plant on a giant catapult and launching it into the air so that a nuclear detonation has the opportunity to transfer as much energy as possible to the atmosphere and generate a mushroom cloud. Detonation is a controlled underground explosion, something that's well understood. There are treaties against doing this for weapons-testing purposes, but this is your worst-case-scenario for denying terrorist access to weapons-grade plutonium.

Nothing terribly magical here. Think about this - nuclear energy is going to happen anyway. When it does, everyone is going to ask why it didn't happen sooner - why did so much irreversible environmental damage have to take place? Why did so many people need to die because of the geo-political intrigue involved with fossil fuels. At this point the anti-nuclear fundamentalist are making Hitler look like a school boy.

"they reduce the risk of being a spreader"

Perhaps, unless they embolden folks the pretend 'Everything is back to normal' while the following is true:

1 - The disease is out there. Unless you socially distance and mask up, you will be a spreader.
2 - If you're any kind of spreader, you're contributing to the creation of a possibly incurable verison of Covid.

In that case, the vaccine becomes like Valtrex and makes the condition it was designed to address worse.

There isn't a gene for "stay at home in the kitchen", but there is a gene that says "one gender is physically stronger than the other". The implication of this gene is that one gender goes out and does the more dangerous hunter-gathering stuff while the other gender "stays at home in the kitchen". The gender that "stays at home in the kitchen" also conveniently has another gene that allows them to lactate.

As a species, we've changed the game of survival so fast that our social mores let alone the genes that drive them aren't keeping up. You can be upset about this if you want, continually looking for patristic bogymen hiding under your bed. But that doesn't describe how things developed (which was perfectly reasonable) or why change should be sought (new opportunities vs. correcting an evil past). Perhaps when you can rightly discern the moment (new opportunities) you'll be a better champion of the causes you believe in.

A lot of folks are HOPING the vaccine stops spread so that deadly mutants don't surface. The official sources haven't confirmed this is the case. Our past experience with the flu vaccine isn't very encouraging (no one ever sold it as a way to end the flu, you always need a new vaccine each year, etc). Hopefully folks will pay close attention to what happens in Israel, and the folks in Israel will keep getting covid test even though the general population will experience less-severe symptoms.

It's quite possible that the covid-19 vaccines ends up being like Valtrex. This was the miracle vaccine to end herpes. To the medical communities horror, high-risk folks took the drug and went right back to high-risk behaviors. This activity caused new mutants which can't be cured. The very agent that could have reduced countless medical suffering instead become a catalyst for creating a worse problem - Your "I'm gonna quit wearing my mask, and go where I want" sentiment might end up being just as menacing

What is indisputable is the following:
1) The vaccine greatly reduces severity of symptoms.
2) The vaccine has negligible side effects.

Based on this information, I will NOT be getting vaccinated until the following happens:
- I know that people older than me have the opportunity to be vaccinated (I'm 55)
- I know that adults younger than me with co-morbidities have the opportunity to be vaccinated (I get a lot of exercise as an adult and I'm in great shape - most US adults need the vaccine way more than I do)
- I know that adults who work in high-contact environments have the opportunity to be vaccinated (I can work from home as a programmer, so the high-contact folks need it more than I do)

Unfortunately no one is trying to call-out these metrics. When the vaccines first came out there was a lot of drama about vaccines ending spread, requiring vaccine passports for work, etc. In the absence of specific anti-spread-claims (and the fact that no one ever sold the flu vaccine this way), I assumed this narrative was all about helping millenials feel better about themselves while they shove past more at-risk members of the general population to get their vaccine first.

Fortunately supply has ramped-up. Hopefully I'll stop hearing about people in the groups I called out 'dying because their first available appointment was one week too late'.

Unlike you, I plan on limiting who I come in contact with for the next several years, as I don't want to contribute to a Valtrex-like catastrophe.

This is the essential problem.

In the past, news organizations could invest in producing well-researched/well-written articles. When they published such articles, it would take 1 to 3 weeks before other news organizations published competing articles. This delay created a perceived value, which is how they made money (subscriptions, advertisers, etc)

Then the internet happened. The internet allowed anyone to share information with a large audience instantly. This is a good thing (progress). Unfortunately, most folks don't understand that 'progress' tends to be complicated: there are always 'winners' and 'losers'. In the case of news organizations, the internet essentially destroyed their business model by destroying the 'delay' that used to exists between when an article was published and when competing articles emerged. If news organization A publishes an article at 6:00 am, Google/BloomBerg/Washington Post/etc can publish a paraphrased version by 7:00 am. Chances are no one will even know that organization A broke the story.

One of the downsides of 'as soon as you publish anything, everyone dog-piles on 5 minutes later' is that articles only have value for a very short amount of time. This means you can't invest as much in producing them (i.e. research, etc). It also means you have to focus on 'telling people what they want to hear' vs. 'telling people what they need to know'. You don't dare publish something that doesn't initially sit well with the audience but over time gets the audience to start thinking about things they would rather avoid.

So now we're trying to enjoy the freedom of expression provided by the internet while maintaining the former business model of journalism. This seems unworkable to me - how do you adjudicate 'freedom of expression' vs. 'intellectual theft'? Even though the media giants claim they can do this (i.e. 'we should decide how much to pay news organizations') and politicians clam they can do this (i.e. we can setup 'arbitration courts' that can do this), I don't have confidence in either one.

Journalism is essential for a functioning democracy and needs to be funded. Everyone is stuck on the idea that the only way to fund an essential service is via the free market. This isn't the case at all. The justice system is funded by taxes. Given that a working justice system has to be impartial, imagine what would happen if folks only got the 'justice' they could paid for.

Perhaps we could start funding journalism with taxes:
1 - Start a tax fund
2 - Before a story breaks, news organizations submit encrypted versions of their research notes to a repository.
3 - When they publish a story that ends up getting traction, they're rewarded based on what they submitted in 2 above.

Sounds like a game-design problem.

How about implement match-making where there's an incentive for experts and noobs to team-up?

Examples:

Shepard the Squad
One expert leads a team of noobs and is rewarded for getting them out alive.

Dose of Reality
Let X number of matches be segregated by skill, but then have a match where experts get dumped into a noob game.

Morty Joins the Squad
Given expert-level teams, a team can take-on a noob and get rewarded if they help him get out alive or get some kills.

Question: (yes or no kind) Do we spend ALL of our resources on healthcare (i.e. X million dollars to give someone 2 more weeks hooked up to a machine before they die) to the exclusion of EVERYTHING else (i.e. education for children, careers for young people, etc)? If the answer is NO, then we're rationing health care. What's different about COVID is that we haven't had as much time to get comfortable with making these tradeoffs as we've had with heart disease, obesity/diabetes, smoking, overdosing from recreational drug use, etc. I would be more angry about this except that other parts of the world have a mixed track record as well, so I see this more as a problem of modern culture than which mascot happens to be running the government. Before someone says something like 'if we had run things like country X, we'd be much better off', consider the following: * COVID seems to have a very deep reservoir. The fact that countries which 'got it right' detect infections after 90, 100 days of no new infections is incredibly scary. * We still haven't identified who 'patient 0' in the US is. Given that we have lots of folks who travelled back-and-forth to Asia and participated in cruise-ship activities, we probably had lots of 'sleeper cells' that were spreading COVID before we could even recognize it. Given the above, we only had a very small window to do something very drastic to contain the disease. I don't recall hearing ANY plan from ANY member of the political class that would have made any difference. Going forward, if you want to mitigate a similar future-pandemic in any meaningful way, you'll need to be comfortable with making the following calls: * Locking down cities - no one in or out (Australia) * Forcibly removing infected individuals from the general population. If this sounds like prison, it is - we still don't even know how long someone remains a contagion-risk. If you can't make the calls above but want to pretend the color of the mascot in charge (red or blue) is the only thing that matters, you're just raping the issue. Please stop doing this, as it poisons our ability to adopt collective solutions that would actually work.

When this virus broke out, it made sense to follow the playbook that worked in dealing with the previous SARS outbreak:

• Contact-tracing infected individuals
• Temporary lockdowns (measured in weeks) for communities with vulnerable populations and emerging community-spread.

We've learned some things about this virus since embarking on that plan:

• There are lots of asymptomatic carriers
• This virus is very contagious
• We don't really have a handle on when someone who contracted the virus stops being a transmission risk.
• We don't have a handle on when someone who contracted the virus gains immunity to it.
• Even countries with everything going for them (homogenous population, authoritative government to facilitate effective contact-tracing) are very nervous about staying-open/reopening.

So, the current strategy is looking more like house-arrest for the next 12-18 months until a vaccine are other successful mitigation is discovered.

While everyone seems to be signed-up for this, it's interesting to note that the affects of the virus are more nuanced:

• If you're in the high-risk group (old, pre-existing conditions, overweight) then 12-18 months of house-arrest is as good as it gets.
• If you're in the low-risk group (young, no pre-existing conditions) then you will likely survive an encounter with this virus and don't need to subject yourself to house-arrest conditions.

It sounds like we should have at least two public responses instead of one:

• If you're in the high-risk group and want to make your situation more secure without adversely affecting others, form or join a Covid-19 Sanitarium. These communities resemble what we have today with the stay-at-home orders and social-distancing protocol.
• If you're in the low-risk group and want to improve your situation without adversely affecting others, form or join a Covid-19 Leper Colony. These communities only have members in the low-risk group. You have all the opportunities I remember having when I was a young adult (start a career, start a family, have children, everyone can participate in society, schools, etc). The only catch is you can't leave, or at least there's a strict quarantine/isolation protocol you have to follow in order to leave - similar to what pets have to go through to gain access to Hawaii.

The current strategy isn't really in anyone's best interest:

• If you're in the low-risk group, you're subjecting yourself to 12-18 months of house arrest that aren't necessary.
• If you're in the high-risk group, you're security is continually getting balanced against economic hardship and sacrifices being made by the low-risk group. As folks get more accustomed to covid-19 deaths and house-arrest-for-all starts taking a toll, a decision to re-open too soon is inevitable.