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Medicine

How Robert Cringely Scored 5 Million N95 Masks From China (cringely.com) 99

This week, tech pundit Robert Cringely described how a chance conversation with China-based entrepreneur Anina led to a friend with a garment factory "now making fully certified N-95 respirators with no clear distribution plan." Late on a Sunday night with the tech world in shut-down, how long would it take for me to find someone looking for up to five million N-95 masks? It took 10 minutes.

I reached out to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and to Mark Cuban from the Dallas Mavericks and Shark Tank... Mark Cuban put me in touch with ProjectN95, a just-created national clearinghouse for urgently needed medical equipment... It's important to realize what a miracle we accomplished. Normally there are lots of middlemen in Chinese distribution, but in this case, there were none, which meant maximal speed and minimal price. The goods were U.S. FDA certified, too, and the certification could be verified...

We are tech people attempting to function during a pandemic, but what really counted here were personal relationships. Anina knows and trusts the factory owner. Anina and I have known each other for 15 years and I've known Marc Benioff and Mark Cuban even longer. We spend billions as a culture trying to build digital versions of such webs of trust, but sometimes it is better to do it the old fashion way.

Comment Global Warming (Score 1) 237

I say fuck the airlines. They're a huge unnecessary contributor to global warming. I do consulting work, and it hasn't been any trouble transitioning to remote solutions for clients. We'd completed it before the sars-cov-2 mess, mostly to make an aging expert workforce happy. Training new consultants has even gotten easier, since you couldn't back channel questions while sitting face to face. If people have family all over the place, it's time to get a remote job and move together, if you want to see them regularly. I'm sure this probably won't be a popular opinion, and I'm not really sure why I'm posting about it. I just made the decision about two years ago to quit flying, among other methods of personally helping fight climate change, and I don't see why other people don't. Off topic, but I also don't get why people don't go vegan. It's an easy lifestyle change, almost nobody actually needs red meat. I've been vegan for 15 years, don't take iron, and still blow the hemoglobin test out of the water every time I give blood, while compatriots who eat meat regularly are unable or close to unable to donate. People like to eat meat, but I like the idea of skinning people alive who support ideologies I don't agree with. I don't do it because it's arguably bad for society, and I don't need to. Anyways, end rant. Apologies for the ramble, I need to get some sleep.

Comment Re: Good (Score 1) 413

2. I would be more in support of a flat income tax (@10%) or a consumption tax (@20%).

Back in 2016 many of the GOP candidates suggested a flat income tax. None of them came close to balancing a budget. The closest was Santorum, with about 100 million dollars deficit per year. He suggested a 20% flat income tax. In the United Kingdom they have a 20% consumption tax, if you want to call it that. However, in order to make 20% feasible, it needs to be a 20% VAT, which generally translates to higher costs to consumers as business don't particularly like to eat their VAT when they can pass it on. Probably the most well known example of a flat AND consumption tax country is Russia. Their taxes are confusing to me, tho. They pay a flat 13% income tax, but then there are other taxes (just like here). However, I think that one of them is an approximately 26% social security tax. Their "consumption tax" is 20%.

Comment Re:Reframing the story for anti-Trump sentiment (Score 1) 413

same goes for all DOE, DOD and DHS expenditures into science, those are all expenditures for research into weapons/defense spending.

When I was in undergraduate our high energy physics lab was funded primarily by DoE funds. We did research on particle decay rates with data from the LHC and SLAC. That fundamental science is now used in radiological sciences for the treatment of cancer.

Comment Just Can't Watch (Score 1) 208

I get motion sickness. I also get it while watching movies that have increased frame rates via frame interpolation, which you can't disable on some televisions. VR gets me, too. All of which seem to be the way media is headed, so I've just been reading more.

Comment Reading Recommendation (Score 2) 357

I don't think most of the commenters actually read the post. Technology_dude was asking for reading recommendations to make him feel better. I can't suggest anything real. Whenever I read things that make me feel better, like new stuff the FSF is doing, it's always tinged by how frequently it's not enough or doesn't spread. For fiction, tho, I read Punch Escrow recently and found it's vision of our future to be uplifting. It's not a utopia, but it may very well be that those are off the table.

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