Some diseases do. Look at how many Native Americans died from their first exposure to various European diseases. That said, there are something like 160 strains of rhinovirus, so you're always getting different one each time you get sick, with no prior immunity, as far as I know, so for that specific variety, I'm pretty sure you are correct.

For a robust immune response, you'll generally want an attenuated virus, not a dead one. I mean, it doesn't matter much for something like flu, because it mutates so quickly that any immunity approaches zero after two or three years anyway, but for any vaccine that you want to actually last for decades, unless your exposure risk is low (e.g. polio in the western world), a live, weakened infection is probably a better option.

See above. The reason attenuated viruses are so much more effective is because they trigger multiple levels of immune response by infecting cells. Programming cells to create parts of real viruses differs only from attenuated vaccines mainly in that the resulting products do not then go on to infect more cells, and that the mRNA bits are usually time-bombed so that they stop producing those virus parts after a period of time, thus minimizing the rate of actual cell death.

But either way, the continued exposure over a longer duration, coupled with the involvement of cellular stress signals, help trigger both the innate and adaptive immune systems, resulting in a stronger immune response than if you just had bits of unexpected dead virus material floating around in isolation.

That's actually way more true with the dead virus vaccines you think are so great. For a classic example, the flu vaccine that caused a detectable uptick in narcolepsy (an autoimmune condition) in Europe, called Pandemrix, was an inactivated, adjuvanted vaccine. The adjuvant somehow triggered autoimmunity in some people. And the adjuvant was needed precisely because without that, the inactivated vaccine did not produce an adequate immune response.

IMO, the odds of an mRNA vaccine causing an autoimmune response are likely orders of magnitude less than an adjuvanted, attenuated vaccine doing so, because an adjuvant causes the immune system to pay more attention to whatever is nearby, including your own cells.

Not all of them. Some of them are independent research scientists, some of them immunologists working in the public sector or academia, etc. The percentage of professionals in this area who work for the vaccine companies is tiny compared with the percentage of independent researchers studying viruses and vaccines. That said, I'd trust even the research teams at the vaccine companies over some random person on YouTube or other Internet sites who shows no actual sign of understanding immunology, but bulls**ts just well enough people to convince a lot of other people who also don't understand it. And sadly, I've seen so much of that level of noise that I have a standing "No, I won't watch your YouTube video about medical subjects; if it were legitimate, it would have been published in a properly peer-reviewed journal" policy at this point. :-)

I mean sure, the folks without clean water might be less susceptible, but only because they're the ones still left who didn't die from it the first time.

Or Barbra Streisand's 1969 acceptance speech.

Every digital cinema camera I've ever heard of has XLR inputs. So if you don't mind being tethered to the boom operator, you don't necessarily even need a field recorder. It all depends on what you're shooting and where and how.

But yeah, decent mics are cheap enough now that even low-end DSLRs have at least survivable mono audio.

Not necessarily. Canvassing can also bring broader attention to something. For example, I'm hearing about this, and my politics don't align with his, but now I'm curious what the issue is about, and might actually pay attention to it.

At some point, it stops being a mob and starts being a vote. And while it makes sense to not allow people to drag random folks onto the platform just to vote your way, it doesn't make sense to limit voting on an important issue to the 0.1% of users who pay close enough attention to notice. So I can see both sides on this one.

Maybe the right thing to do is to require a certain level of activity to earn the right to vote, then dump the canvassing rules. That way, any canvassing would only serve to increase turnout, rather than truly padding the ballot box.

Doesn't even need time code. FCP lines up the files by matching the audio, mostly, IIRC. Also AFAIK, digital cinematography is pretty much the norm at this point, so film likely doesn't factor in most of the time.

Final Cut Pro can already basically do that, and has been able to do that for several years. Just create a multicam workflow and tell it to synchronize by audio. Not sure how well it works if you're dealing with hundreds of short takes though; I've only used it to line up hour-long continuous shots.

Then again, as cheap as storage is, I'm not sure why anybody actually stops the cameras and audio recorders anyway. If you want to have a private conversation, you can always step off the set and do it in a hallway or whatever.

The iPhone 6s (released in 2015) got a security update last month. So that's almost 11 years and counting.

Define "enough". Even 1 percent of the federal budget would be 74 *billion* dollars. The budget shortfall for road maintenance in the U.S. is about 86 billion, so even if it is only 1%, that money would be enough to almost completely fix a major problem that affects us all.

There are no large sources of waste, unless you count "money spend for things we don't agree with". That said, I think you underestimate how much waste results from people doing things that computers could do, but which nobody has spend the money to automate.

It's more than just the right of first sale; with software that is licensed via server-side communication, nothing prevents the company from terminating your authorization for any reason, and you have basically no recourse at that point, other than to sue.

There's a lot wrong with software in the modern era.

Because they don't know where the small sources of waste are, and it takes time to fix them. If you need an immediate reduction right this second, the only thing you can do is surgical cuts, which means laying people off. Fixing the small sources of waste has to be an ongoing process that continues forever, and most of the interesting fixes actually cost *more* money in the short term to save money in the long term.

They might, if it happens to be at the end of the year when they do the cuts, and if that spending happens to be enough, but most of the time when this happens, they're looking for 30% cuts, not 1%. And finding thousands of fractional-percent cuts takes too long.

Not really, no. Inflation changes the value of the dollar. That means the government's debt also becomes less expensive every year, assuming all else is equal. And inflation causes increases in income, both for businesses and individuals, which means revenue should be increasing roughly proportionally. If it isn't, then that means the tax code is failing to properly capture percentages of actual gains, and this is something that needs to be fixed structurally.

In inflation-adjusted dollars, treasury revenue is going up, at least on average. From 2015 to 2025, tax revenue increased by 18.3%. Meanwhile, assuming Gemini isn't gaslighting me, the U.S. population increased by only about 6.6% in that time. So not only is revenue increasing after adjusting for inflation, it is also increasing relative to the population size after adjusting for inflation.

I can't tell you why service seems to always be getting worse. Maybe it is because we're spending rapidly increasing amounts of money on the most inefficient healthcare system in the first world, driven by a combination of lack of a public option or single payer system, poor auditing of payments, massively delayed payments that cause small healthcare providers to struggle to survive and force consolidation into giant regional monopolies, and probably a lot of other things that I don't know about because I don't work in that field.

When you end up having hyperinflation of your medical insurance costs, it eats a bigger and bigger piece of every other part of the budget. And the federal government is not immune to that.

There are probably other reasons as well. That's just the first one that comes to mind.

This is moot, because as you can see from the chart, inflation-adjusted revenue increased rather rapidly during that same period.

Maybe a percent or two, but with a budget is big enough, that's still a lot of money that could be used for something else.

The point is not that any of these things individually will result in big gains. The point is that there are a lot of different small inefficiencies that add up to a bigger inefficiency.

For example, for some reason, when the IRS sent out their findings for tax exempt status, a group that I work with never got the determination letter. And the IRS had no straightforward mechanism to resend the letter. Fixing it involved hundreds of phone calls before we reached a person who could help, and then waiting for someone to print it and mail it to us. All of this stuff should be in electronic records, and it should have been trivial for us to directly get a new copy electronically from their computer systems without requiring a person at the IRS to intervene.

Every time a person has to do something because a computer lacks code to do it, that is an example of government waste. It probably isn't worth fixing all of them, because sufficiently rare things could take decades to recover the cost of coding them, but that doesn't mean that someone shouldn't triage them, catalog them, prioritize them so that the scope is fully understood, because when you do that, you may find other people coming in later and saying, "If you do that, it will save me time on related task [x]," and that might then turn out to push it into "implement this ASAP" territory. Without documenting the state of things, those discoveries won't ever get made, and nothing will improve.

And the IRS has multiple incompatible login systems that use different credentials, multiple sites that expose different parts of the same access to information about your business/charity, etc. all of which have to be maintained, resulting in massive levels of redundancy, not to mention causing massive confusion for anyone who ever has to access them, wondering why it says they don't have an account even though they had to have one to fill out previous IRS paperwork. Replacing them with different views into the same data (with access right limits, presumably) in the same online system would likely save significant money, both in terms of software maintenance costs and server operation costs.

And how much auditor time could be saved if they trained AI models on previous audits and used that as a starting point for flagging suspicious returns and/or filtering suspicious returns flagged by existing automation? I don't have any idea, but I would not be surprised if that approach eventually produced meaningful long-term savings.

And every time they send out tax forms, what manual processes have to happen to distribute advance copies to companies like TurboTax, and how much time would be saved if we had a centralized, modern electronic version of all of the forms, rather than PDFs, with an open source implementation, complete with code to populate one form from another, etc.? Maybe it would cost more initially, but would save money in some other areas, like making it easier for auditors to recompute the taxes after fixing errors in data entry. I'm not sure, but these are the sorts of efficiency wins that should be looked at.

So in that one division alone, there are glaringly obvious inefficiencies that, if fixed, could result in considerable cost reduction. Similarly, every time you deal with someone at the Social Security Administration or (at the state level) the DMV and they tell you that the computer system is down and they'll try again in a minute, that's an example of government waste. It's a system that isn't working correctly, which as a result, wastes the time of hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of government workers on an ongoing basis.

There's no reason to believe any other part of the government is any better. Government IT is known for being disastrously slow at modernization, and it costs taxpayers a lot of money because our government doesn't spend the money to bring those systems up to date in a timely manner.

These are just some examples that are obvious from the outside looking in; there are probably many less obvious examples that would be obvious to someone who works there every day. And that's the point. The people at the top can't see what wastes the time of the people at the bottom, because they don't have visibility into their minute-by-minute activities (and even if they could, they would have a hard time filtering the flood of data into something useful). So you have to drive efficiency from the bottom up, and our government does not do this, so we can never really know whether that inefficiency adds up to half a percent or ten percent.

We can't get a complete picture without going to the people at the bottom of the org chart and asking them what could be done to make them more efficient, what could reduce waste, etc. It's a relatively easy low-hanging-fruit task, so we should do this. :-)

I hope that makes my position clearer.