Everyone else is calling you out for your misinformation, and they're right to do so. I'll add more.

mRNA vaccine research was funded for 9 years before COVID broke out, by DARPA. It turned out it was highly effective at stopping aggressive immune responses, which is what actually kills people with infectious diseases and pandemics; our body's response to the disease.

Moderna had already done some generic testing with both animals and hundreds of human studies for years before COVID; we had nearly a decade of non-stop research that included human trials before Covid even happened. Framing it as untested and not passing safety trials is simply FUD.

From the article:

"The benefit appeared even larger after the six-month vaccine regimen, with a separate analysis showing a 58% reduction in risk of recurrence or death. The companies say it is still too early to determine whether the treatment helps patients live longer overall."

It's far more promising than people expected. What happened was the analysts, who while they know pharma companies still barely understand the science, thought it would be higher and were estimating that so the stock pumped up. when it came in lower than expected, the market reacted.

But who cares? Based on that quote alone, the market is reacting stupidly. Buy the dip; if you have some free cash by Moderna stock. It'll come back up soon, as just as you said this is a great drug.

I'm sure that feels good to say, and you probably feel like you're having a mic drop moment, but you're entirely wrong proven by the long march of history.

Tibet pursued a policy of peaceful isolationism influenced by Buddhist pacifism. In 1950, they got curb stomped by the PLA, conquered and the Dalai Lama sent into exile.

In 416 BC, the Island/City state of Melos chose neutrality during the Peloponnesian War. Athens (the Democracy I should add, not the authoritarian Spartans), demanded they submit and become a vassal state to the growing Athenian sphere of influence. THey refused, Athens invaded, killed every man, enslaved all the women and children, and repopulated the city with Athenian citizens. This was famously summed up in the Melian Dialogue by Thucydides, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Denmark signaled to Nazi Germany they intended to stay neutral and built a small army, to show they were no threat, and signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. In 1940, Germany broke the pact, invaded, conquered the country in 6 hours.

There are many others all throughout history. The only examples of entities surviving without a strong military are countries like Costa Rica and Mexico, which they could do because they fell inside the security umbrella of the United States, who was adamant that the Western Hemisphere would be peaceful, or else. Other small countries like Lichtenstein or Iceland did it through alliances, like Iceland joining NATO with a special caveat that they would build no military, but all NATO could use it's ports and airfields as bases.

Greater men than us today, who experienced enormous hardships, understood this. Si vis pacem, para bellum has been proven true time and again in history.

Fun fact: it used to be called the Department of War, so technically you could be referring to George Washington. It was renamed the Department of Defense in 1947.

Regardless, your point is entirely valid.

Clearly you missed the part where i call out the current administration.

But honest truth: it isn't Trump. Trump is just the symptom of a broader movement; he wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected if there wasn't a broader movement happening. The reality is that the Baby Boomer and Gen X'rs who were in charge during the 80s, 90s, and early 2000's, whether they were Neo-Con Republicans or the newer Democrats, were globalists. They built a system that built wealth, security and prosperity for them, but missed two key aspects: they locked the door behind them for the next generation to participate in that wealth, and they used the middle class's wealth to fund that security. As a result, the middle class and upcoming generations got fed up, lost faith in both parties, and elected an outsider. About 1/3rd of my relatives are Trump supporters; they all despise him personally, but their vote for him was a vote against all others; frankly many of them would have elected a Golden Retriever as long as he wasn't part of the insider political class, but Trump was what they got. The globalists of the world built a globalized world, but didn't manage their base well and the base revolted when they perceived they weren't being taken care of, and as a result we're seeing a crisis of confidence in government leading to the election of "anything but them".

I say that because Trump is not a US-only phenomenon. Nationalism is growing all around the world right now. France is having major riots that started with youth and spun way out of control, and following the polls, Marie le Pen is the most likely next Prime Minister of France. She is a French female Trump, and has said Day 1 if she gets the top job she will stop all funding and support to Ukraine and drop sanctions on Russia. Germany is seeing another revival of nationalism, so is Italy, the UK, Hungary, Brazil, India, Turkey; all are reviving nationalism. Heck even China is using nationalism to shore up domestic support of the government, and you're even seeing growing nationalism in Canada of all places. This is a global phenomenon; Trump is just the US' version of it.

The US military is still strong. Nationalist tendencies grew in the Philippines about a decade ago, leading to the removal of US troop presence; now they're asking for it back because of Chinese belligerence. The US military is still the most capable fighting force on the planet and in history, but it's strength is being tested by autonomous systems which allow countries to dominate their own local region way above their ability previously and for quite cheap. To maintain it's role as the strong stabilizer, the US Military does need to retool, and quickly (and it is, I have many old and current contacts in the DoD and there are some fascinating projects going on) to counter this rapid growth in technology, which goes back to my point: it's foolish of these people to quit Google in protest over supporting the US military right when the US military needs new tools to project strength and actually promote peace.

I'll reply and give you extra points; you're absolutely right.

This is something I see a lot; people who are intelligent but not really aware of how the world works, but also completely unaware of their own lack of understanding.

The facts of the world are:

1) The US military's enormous strength has kept the world relatively peaceful for 70 years. Yes there have been wars and other conflicts; you can't solve every problem. But compared to the World Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco Prussian Wars, the Seven Years' War (which some define as the first real World War), and the Thirty Years' War, the back half of the 20th century by comparison was relatively quiet. That's because the US gave the world a choice: trade with us and prosper, or challenge us and be destroyed. You can do that with a powerful military, and occasionally it has to be used, but we haven't seen a conflict even remotely on the scale of the major World Wars until Ukraine. There are issues and problems, but the US' military strength made going Total War again far too costly, when it was just cheaper and better all around to trade. So as much as they are taking a stand on morals, the reality is that the very strength of the US military historically has suppressed conflict.

2) That doesn't mean people won't try to push, again as we've seen in Ukraine. Almost all forms of conflict became asymmetrical; deadly, and it makes headlines, but for the most part asymmetrical warfare could not existentially threaten a nation. But, again as we've seen in Ukraine and now Iran, there are limits to the US military's strength, which built a system of high efficient, high cost systems for global power projection, but are significantly challenged by middling efficient, ultra cheap systems in large numbers. And while you may not want the US military to have AI tools, all you're doing is hobbling the one military who's very power ensured an era of relative peace and prosperity will be unprepared when potential adversaries are empowered with those tools. And quitting Google will not stop Iran or China or Russia or anyone else from developing AI weapons.

Given that the US military's very strength kept the world relatively peaceful when looking at the long view of human history, the moral argument against supporting the DoD falls apart pretty quickly. I could understand not wanting to support the current administration which is absolutely a warmonger, but that changes.

It's Microsoft, and it's an AI world and MS at a corporate level is heavily invested in AI. I'm curious when it's announced how much of this new product will incorporate Copilot in some fashion (and I'm not advocating for it, just expecting it).

I didn't know that, and probably never would because I wasn't planning on watching it. I actually spent time in this industry around when Theranos was first publicly known and then during the fall from grace. Theranos didn't kill diagnostics as a startup field on it's own; it was already headed that way. But the company certainly made it hard for people doing real science that worked; the entire story evaporated. Even the trailers bring back memories of a hard time I'd rather not revisit, so didn't realize they brought in Seyfried too. Makes sense though, I imagine it's very weird to have someone portray you while you're still alive particularly when that portrayal is about your failings, so that's a whole other dimension to this story.

Yep, that unblinking stare, the large size. She's like a predator trying to calm it's prey before it kills.

It helped her that her parents worked for the government, the State Department, for many years, as well as Enron (surprise surprise). her family lived next door to Tim Draper, one of the early and more successful silicon valley VCs, and her dad was college friends with Don Lucas, who was also an extremely well known investor in Silicon Valley and he became the first Chairman, and he introduced her to Larry Ellison who also invested.

These things are orchestrated, not led.

The show you're referring to with Amanda Seyfried was a dramatization of the events. This is a documentary with a guy who lived with her and her new husband while she was preparing her court defense and later preparing to go to prison, so it's actually Holmes in this.

I talked about this in a post below, about how her perspective is too narrow to look at the direct result. But to your point, let's take her assertions:

In the video linked by the GP:

3:47 - she asks where do the neutrinos come from? And then answers "we don't really know, we just know they exist, which we kind of knew that already". The implication is it didn't do anything new. This is incorrect. IceCube detects around 200M neutrinos per day. Because neutrinos travel in straight lines whereas cosmic rays can be deflected by magnetic fields, this neutrino mapping process is actually a good way to trace the locations of high energy events, and they were able to trace the neutrinos origins in high energy events. Most neutrinos they detect are low energy and form a kind of background glow across the sky; those are much harder to trace the origin. Does that mean it's not valuable? Not at all, it means those low energy neutrinos are something we just don't understand yet, but do have the data for. So suggesting IceCube only detected the presence of something we already knew and nothing else about their origin is just a total distortion; rather it created a new way of looking at the universe were just beginning to understand.

4:04 - she asks "What is it good for? nothing really. it does teach us something about neutrino sources outside our galaxy but that's pretty much it." Again this is a distortion. We have data we never had, just because today we're not ready to interpret it doesn't mean it's not useful. But it has been useful. Neutrinos are massless and have no charge, so they escape major astrologically active environments without interference. This created a whole new dimension to "Multi-messenger astronomy", as in we have another tool beyond photons, EM, and gravitational waves to explore the universe, one that has different sources of noise. Neutrinos also travel in perfectly straight lines, creating a new tool to map the galaxy and others. In fact the first neutrino map of the milky way was finished in 2023. One interesting finding from this map is the Milky Way is an order of magnitude dimmer in neutrinos than other galaxies, suggesting our central supermassive black hole as a different kind of activity going on. They are now exploring if dark matter particles when they collide might create neutrinos and see if the neutrino detector can be used to explore dark matter.

The rest of her video is just editorializing and her opinion, coming to a grand sweeping conclusion that modern physics does nothing for human kind. She's entitled to her opinion, but it's not based on the facts. As i stated in another post, the steps it took to build this highly complex device actually created useful tools that are being used in other industries to good effect. Physics is by definition fundamental and aspirational, and the benefit isn't always immediately obvious or direct, but aspirational goals can result in a cascade of new methods, technologies and capabilities just by taking the journey to that aspiration. The value of the journey is by no means discounted just because we may not know what the end of the journey looks like.

Your concept of what makes good science is ludicrous as is Sabine Hossenfelder. In that same context, the Apollo program was entirely a net loss to humanity as it brought back some rocks. But the effort to build the Apollo program invented so many new technologies, concepts, materials and other things that we use now in every day life.

Same with IceCube. Virtually nothing in astrophysics has a direct return on investment. But IceCube did detect the high energy neutrinos and created a whole new view into the universe, it added to the depth of knowledge of the Standard Model, and created whole new maps of the Milky Way. So it did directly contribute to the broader scientific view.

But it also required new forms of data analysis, such as the HTCondor Software that runs massive parallel data analysis operations on thousands of GPUs; said software is now used by financial institutions, pharmaceutical development and CGI. THe pressure domes used to house the sensors, which experience roughly 240 atmospheres of pressure, created new manufacturing techniques now used by undersea drone production. Their drilling technique in the ice created the Enhanced Hot Water Drill, which is now used to study permafrost and track climate change as well as understand glacial formation.

So, no, IceCube did quite a lot. Often times the journey to do something really hard creates meaningful value in the effort to just take some steps.

Nobels aren't awarded for ideas.

Nobels are awarded for the concept, the planning, the execution of the idea, generating data and proving a result.

Learned did good work, but his proposal and concept failed.

Same. The other case in the summary has exactly the same issue:

"Florida was also the site of another Flock-related news story. ("Florida Deputy Allegedly Used Flock Cameras to Stalk 17-Year-Old Girl, Visiting Her at Work 9 Times".) The officer "was charged with official misconduct and accessing computer electronic devices without authority — both are third-degree felonies. In Florida, if he's found guilty on both charges, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison."

"Americans have no idea who's looking at that information, or why it has to be collected in the first place," U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday, adding "They deserve to know."

Schumer says Americans have no idea who's looking at that information, but they caught the cop and he's facing charges. If they didn't know, they wouldn't have found him. So this makes little sense?

Same as you, not a fan of flock and 100% agree with the 4th amendment concerns here. But if you're going to go after someone, use a story and an argument where the facts can't be easily explained away.