The size is totally irrelevant as to ethics.
Since I suspect I was critically exposed to SARS-CoV-2 this morning I will not be able to ask her except remotely what her sources of 'video of concern' were. She may have kept a playlist.
I would be delighted to find that Biden's problems are rust, or even poor attitude, rather than something nominally or factually geriatrically related. Even if the only thing he did for passenger railroading was to push Gateway into finances-contract stage it would be enough. No one else... for all-too-explicable New York reasons... is likely to do that before well into the 2020s.
Interestingly enough, there are ways to make many of Bernie's state's priorities actually workable. Just not the way he calls for them to be funded (or vaguely dodges the issue if someone mentions the numbers). And no, it doesn't involve the moral equivalent of either John Law or Horace Greeley Schacht's MeFo bonds to produce. So we shouldn't dismiss him for not knowing the right methodologies any more than we should blame Reagan for a slow start in addressing stagflation.
charlie hebdo It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him.
It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him.
Most intelligent corporate conflict of interest policies do take proportionality into account. The Sanofi allegation is also laughable as Sanofi does not sell the medication in question in the US and the patent expired decades ago.
The usual drug testing regime doesn't make sense for COVID-19 as we will be well past the peak by the time the testing is finished - think war time protocols. The drug is available now in large quantities, and side effects are well. known. Since survival rate of people going on ventilators is about 30 - 35% at best, anything that reduces the number of people needing ventilator support will be helpful.
charlie hebdoThe size is totally irrelevant as to ethics.
The size is totally relevant to plausibility.
York1 John
After this virus issue goes away, the U.S. is left with questions.
1. New York has suffered several major terrorist attacks. Since the first terror attack in 1993, the idea of a major biological attack has been floated, and terrorists would most likely pick NYC or Washington, DC, for the target.
Why, then, do we find ourselves so flat-footed? NYC's lack of hospital rooms, supplies, etc., seem to indicate our preparedness has a long ways to go.
2. Critical medicines and supplies are dependent on other countries, especially China. The U.S. emergency planning seems to have overlooked the fact that a possible enemy may be in control of the exact medical supplies and equipment we would need in an attack.
Hopefully, one of the outcomes of this whole situation will be to make us prepare ourselves better.
Erik_Mag charlie hebdo It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him. Most intelligent corporate conflict of interest policies do take proportionality into account. The Sanofi allegation is also laughable as Sanofi does not sell the medication in question in the US and the patent expired decades ago. The usual drug testing regime doesn't make sense for COVID-19 as we will be well past the peak by the time the testing is finished - think war time protocols. The drug is available now in large quantities, and side effects are well. known. Since survival rate of people going on ventilators is about 30 - 35% at best, anything that reduces the number of people needing ventilator support will be helpful.
Excusing corruption?
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
charlie hebdoCoal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time.
BaltACD Excusing corruption?
If Sanofi was making a good fraction of its of money selling the medication in the US and Trump had a lot more money directly invested in Sanofi, then corruption would be a concern. With the circumstances in this case, the corruption charge is a joke. You would be much better off looking at campaign donations.
I think a better explanation for Trump's actions is that if it works, then he will have something to campaign on.
Unintended consequences department. Has anyone noticed how clear the nights are when there are no clouds around during the past few weeks ?
A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. The magnitude is irrelevant. Those naysayers don't know ethics and are simply Trump apologists.
charlie hebdoA conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. The magnitude is irrelevant. Those naysayers don't know ethics and are simply Trump apologists.
Well, I guess you'd better write your Congressman and demand new impeachment articles be drawn.
And go ahead. Lump me into the group of people who don't know ethics. That's a first for me.
There are also stories that Trump pal Rudi Giuliani purchased about $2 million in shares of Novartis, which also makes hydroxychloroquine.
About 3 weeks ago, I was getting the feeling that when the shock of this event dies down a little, it will be replaced with a national reaction of rage over the damage that has been done to us by this pandemic. I thought the country would look for someone to blame and that might be China.
Over the last couple years, I have watched World Trade Advisor, Peter Navarro wage a trade war against China and have been surprised at how vidictive he is. He seems to regard China as being pure evil mostly as a part of their communist form of government. He has written books about trade wars and real wars with China almost as a prophecy. I have watched his interviews and find him to be extremely confrontational. He is very good at it, but I disgree with most of his ideas.
Now all of a sudden, he is emerging as a key figure in a grievance with China related to the coronavirus outbreak and China withholding the news of that event. At the same time, I do detect that emerging national rage that I was anticipating. Oddly enough, Navarro also wrote a book several years ago as a fictional account of how filthy conditions of China cause a world pandemic. Clearly, he was holding China responsible for negligence in causing that fictional outbreak.
But now Navarro is being joined by others who are calling for the elimination of the communist party of China. Trump, Steve Bannon, and others are also joining the fight, calling for a damage settlement from China to compensate our losses. Some are calling for us to default on our debt to China. Trump is talking about taking China to court in some international venue.
They are saying that what China has done in hoarding the world supply of medical safety supplies amounts to the Chinese communist party committing first degree murder.
I only had a vague idea that something like might happen rather gradually as everything sunk in. But it seems to have started right up with a bang in no uncertain terms. This is all just in the last few days. We are suddenly demanding a lot from China, and I don't think they will comply. Then what?
I am really disappointed at the cases acknowledged by most of the world's countries. The USA has announced a total cases of 1,315 cases per million population. The Western European countries also report within 15 - 20 % a number close to that figure. South Korea and Japan have a smaller numbers but are considered very reliable. The rest of the world not so much .
So the question is will we see a sudden increase in the future ? I hope not but am not optomistic. Here is link that is updated around midnight greenwich mean time ( 2000 EDT, 8:00 PM EDT ).
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The table takes takes little understanding. The now table consists of a running total forwarded to the keepers for time from Midnight GMT . The yesterday table seems to be previous GMT day which appears to be fixed. The NOW table will change approximately every hour each time you renew the link.
The big population countries I suspect under reporting are China of course, Russia from another source of mine, and India which probably is completely overwhelmed ?
I really want each of our posters to reach their own conclusions.
Normally I ignore this type of thread that goes way off into the weeds. This reads more and more like one of those Rosanne-Rosanna-Dana discussions on the old version of Saturday Night Live. So can we somehow bring this back to a discussion related to railroads in some form please?
EuclidNow all of a sudden, he is emerging as a key figure in a grievance with China related to the coronavirus outbreak and China withholding the news of that event.
Yet where is the rage against the C-in-C for ignoring Navaroo's Janurary memo to him that the virus was a real threat to the US. But it was ignored by the C-in-C who clains he stopped the pandenic by closing imigration from China.
charlie hebdo "I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment." I witnessed major memory loss in my mother, both in-laws, my late wife, an aunt, a very close cousin, and now my best friend. I disagree with you that Biden's problem is only just "rust". I see too many simularities with him and the progression I saw occurring with my family and friend. "Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time." Natural gas is definitely replacing coal. However, once coal stocks hit rock bottom, Soros did indeed purchase a significant amount of coal stock. Given his past history financial history as a "predatory purchaser", it does raise questions especially because of his relationship with Obama. I don't know why he bought it but he certainly didn't buy it to help the coal miners and their communities.
"I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment."
I witnessed major memory loss in my mother, both in-laws, my late wife, an aunt, a very close cousin, and now my best friend. I disagree with you that Biden's problem is only just "rust". I see too many simularities with him and the progression I saw occurring with my family and friend.
"Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time."
Natural gas is definitely replacing coal. However, once coal stocks hit rock bottom, Soros did indeed purchase a significant amount of coal stock. Given his past history financial history as a "predatory purchaser", it does raise questions especially because of his relationship with Obama. I don't know why he bought it but he certainly didn't buy it to help the coal miners and their communities.
charlie hebdo I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment. What specifically concerned you or your daughter Although I have been called a socialist on here, I felt Sanders was ill-equipped for the job due to his historic inability to work with others along with very fuzzy math about how to pay for some of his planned policies. Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time.
I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment. What specifically concerned you or your daughter
Although I have been called a socialist on here, I felt Sanders was ill-equipped for the job due to his historic inability to work with others along with very fuzzy math about how to pay for some of his planned policies.
Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time.
Well said.
Nice to see some fellow "socialists" operating out and in the open. I'll see you guys at the next meeting!
I must be something even worse, seeing as I live in a country with a single-payer healthcare system.....
Amazing what I missed when I neglected to check in on this thread for a few days.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
The only true idiot is the one that believes he/she knows everything about everything and can't benefit from recommendations from acknowledged experts in individual fields that have spent their entire careers in researching, examining and testing various hypothesis in the particular subject field.
BaltACDThe only true idiot is the one that believes he/she knows everything about everything and can't benefit from recommendations from acknowledged experts in individual fields that have spent their entire careers in researching, examining and testing various hypothesis in the particular subject field.
Part of the problem is that there are so many experts, acknowledged or otherwise, who have spent their entire careers being just plain wrong -- or worse, suppressive of things that turn out to be better lines of inquiry. What was done to Sabin springs rather promptly to mind, as does quite a bit of the science described in Barry's book.
In any case, there isn't any real question that someone who ignores the actual science and the actual results entirely, but then claims knowledge, is an idiot... these are the 'bold new theory' ones who become increasingly snotty and abusive in defending the more you question them. The more interesting question comes when you have a complex issue that involves having to learn 'what you know' entirely from standing on the shoulders of a great many people with more or less of a career in the relevant studies and sciences ... but who may be, collectively, a bit like an inept cheerleading squad who just can't make a stable base for further understanding. That doesn't mean the researchers themselves are idiots, or even that they might be misguided in their own research careers. Unfortunately unless someone does a little retrospective analysis on their reproduceable results, there may be problems with tunnel vision ... I would bring up the whole issues of "B. influenzae" inducing ARDS as a rather illustrative case in point.
It's worse when you have people who have been 'trained' to listen to the last, or the most commonly espoused, comments on a given subject, but don't or won't do any further reading, or actually work critically to understand a particular issue in depth or look at ramifications beyond what someone tells them. In the past this sort of critical quality was taught as an essential part of a 'liberal arts education' -- in fact was often the only real thing of value taught in four years of college that wasn't more or less functionally outdated by subsequent events.
In my opinion there is little that is particularly 'unknown' about COVID-19 or its functional mechanisms of spread at present, and that includes a fairly large and rapidly-expanding set of potentially-effective therapies that are being confirmed at a proper biochemical level by what I consider good research methodology and reporting. The problem is that so many of the 'experts' actually involved in making and executing response policy seem to have nowhere near the interest in actually following the complex of different specialties that is really necessary to achieve first control, then stoppage, of the prompt-death issues in COVID-19 ... to this day I have not seen a proposal for one of these 'field hospitals' that is not built in some enormous poorly-ventilated space, tacitly on the open-ward principle that would be promptly lethal for a novel influenza strain, and by experience for SARS-CoV-2. (We can get into secondary and nosocomial infections if that isn't enough.) I see pictures on the news of the facilities producing high casualty rates in the New York area -- people probably progressing to ARDS helpfully parked with 'six foot separation' cheek-by-jowl in hallways, with some band-aid plastic sheeting taped flappingly all around. Do not try to suggest to me that anyone conversant with the likely epidemiology of this now characterized and sequenced virus has actually designed this. Do not try to suggest to me that whoever the 'experts' were that are calling for this sort of concentration of triaging care, their views deserve continuing to be treated as 'recommendations' merely through what is little more than an appeal to authority in the relevant respects.
On the other hand, I'll be the first to say that you have to read, listen carefully and fully to, and try to comprehend any expert opinion in a field in which one has not been intensively trained -- they are the only real source of meaningful input that most people are likely to have in complex technical matters. One very positive thing about the modern Internet is that it facilitates, in principle if not always 'in the event', access to a broad range of information together with access to resources to understand that information better. A further thing that is positive is the number of researchers, and services, that are making SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research freely available to people (not just to subscribers of pay journals and services, as has often been the 'profit model' since the '90s) ... sure, you get a lot of bitter with the sweet, but science and technology research has always involved a great deal of careful 'source filtration'.
What I find depressing is the general lack of common sense in media reporting, including how public-policy decisions or edicts are reported or promulgated. If anyone were to try to figure the 'coronavirus situation' out from typical public reporting ... usually "researched" in what we have called typical newsworker fashion no further than one or two opinionated reference sources ... they probably wouldn't get very far; if they were to build up some kind of view of the 'big picture' by assimilating multiple such reports, net of all the primacy/latency/recency concerns regarding this sort of thing, the result is more likely to approximate 'idiocy' than reasoned understanding.
I've said it before, I'll say it again here -- where are the Lippmann-style explainers of complex issues in simple layman's terms? As an example, there is little involved in the protein-folding and progressive-conformation issues connected with spike-protein association with ACE2 that could not be explained in a half-hour of proper discussion. Much that is a mystery to people trying to understand what hydroxychloroquine actually does will be made much clearer thereby, in ways that would be pretty inexplicable without that knowledge. I certainly lack the information, the reagents, and the specific training to do the research and testing, but I can certainly understand both the results and the implications; I don't see anything in the results that is so abstruse, or so dependent on fudgeable statistical interpretation, that it couldn't be 'lay-explained' to anyone sufficiently interested to learn.
One of the serious take-home messages of the 1918-20 influenza pandemic -- which has been repeatedly ignored since then, remarkably so since the 1990s -- is that interdisciplinary research, retrospectives, and efforts are necessary in a response, and indeed in building systems to anticipate how a good response needs to be made. And, as with the end of Preminger's movie of On The Beach, 'it is not too late' to start taking correct action no matter how many flubs, missteps, and wacky DiBlasio/Johnson style stupidities have been committed right up to the present. Precisely how all the disparate specialties can be coordinated into a coherent organization which does not itself become hidebound in key respects is a very interesting 'timeless topic' in organization theory. (I might quote you Ellsworth's Third Rule, which notes only partly tongue-in-cheek that there is no problem in political science that hasn't been solved in business administration, and no problem in business administration that hasn't been solved in political science ... you just have to know what's on the 'other end of the table'.)
The big new thing that is already coming out of this COVID-19 'reaction' -- I won't formally call it an 'Over-reaction' -- is that we now understand in a concrete and realized sense what the enormous costs of 'having done nothing' to set up for pandemics can be. It remains to be seen if other groups of experts can get together to figure out how to rebuild an economy that functions -- hopefully, one that fixes problems and distortions in the previous one. (Judging by what I heard from Administration spokesmen yesterday afternoon, we're going to get the equivalent of "we have top men working on it. Top men." But perhaps that is unfairly too snarky without waiting to see how the peaches rot.)
SD70Dude charlie hebdo I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment. What specifically concerned you or your daughter Although I have been called a socialist on here, I felt Sanders was ill-equipped for the job due to his historic inability to work with others along with very fuzzy math about how to pay for some of his planned policies. Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time. Well said. Nice to see some fellow "socialists" operating out and in the open. I'll see you guys at the next meeting! I must be something even worse, seeing as I live in a country with a single-payer healthcare system..... Amazing what I missed when I neglected to check in on this thread for a few days.
I feel compelled to remind people that the original universal health insurance system was that of German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, hardly a socialist, in the 1880s.
OM: I enjoyed reading your rationalization/"paen" to the generalist, though I wish you could have had the experience of specialization where one learns how to write succinctly and avoid tangentialisms.
Well, get ready to say good-bye to bacon. Meat processors are starting to shut down.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/meat-plant-closures-coronavirus/index.html
Hello? John Conner are you out there?
OM: Not "playing the blame game" is dangerous when it's just trying to avoid responsibility for incompetence. And the long-term damage is not learning from mistakes, which seems to be endemic with those under 30.
In addition to the memo from Trump pal Navarro (obviously seen), after supposedly closing travel from China, another 40-140 K travellers entered. And unknown thousands entered NYC from Europe before that belated closing.
A link of how covid19 and other corona virus interact with a human's immune system. Food for thought.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-06/it-s-still-hard-to-predict-who-will-die-from-covid-19
charlie hebdoI wish you could have had the experience of specialization where one learns how to write succinctly and avoid tangentialisms.
I can probably do it as well as anybody (although, alas, not as well as Stan Franklin!) when actually writing in or for one of my areas of specialization. I certainly had the training from a comparatively early age...
The tangentialisms are often a hazard of having to cover too many assumptions in one candy bar. It's further worsened when some of the tangents/digressions are not commonly accepted or common sense, but require some explication in and of themselves. I confess I was never wholly amused by Twain's 'red cow' story -- I find myself duplicating the problem in good discussions far too much of the time.
My father had an adage that solved some of this: he said 'you wait until everyone has discussed themselves out, all the other arguments have been made, all the facts have been checked, and then ... only then ... swoop down and <kapow> use just a few well-honed and well-chosen words to make your point conclusively. I wish I could follow this advice far better than I so often do.
What I suspect we actually need are more of Larry Niven's nonspecializing specialists -- a very different thing from traditional generalists, who are often (and not necessarily 'perforce') disturbingly close to amateurs in rigor. Much of this hinges on better conduct of scientific communications, both as composed/written and as read. If we compare, for example, Faraday's writing (for scientists or non-scientists alike) with the general kind of linguistic-psychology works mentioned in The Mind-Body Problem, we can see both how far things have 'fallen' and some reasonable models for how the trick should be done.
I argued years ago that an optional section should be added to the appendices of scholarly papers setting out all the assumptions made underlying the research and methodologies. That could be footnoted appropriately in introductory text or discussion without acting as a digression or tangentialism for those more interested in following the paper directly. You can see how popular this idea has proven to be. But, as with superscript-number footnoting, it permits the intended effect of tangential digressions without heavily influencing the reading-through... especially if, as I recommended, instead of quoting large numbers of reference numbers sequentially, you had one reference that 'points to' a list of actual appropriate references as provided in the actual bibliography.
One interesting thing that 'ties' this discussion to railroading is that a great many of the things needed to set up a proper 'permanent vigilance' organization for future pandemic response are common to elements that Joe's Amtrak training proposal implicitly has to contain or to reference. This includes battling egos or agencies, budgeters who are tightwads until expedience of some sort flips them like Euc changing opinions, various folks with agendas to be more or less 'ridered' along, and hard methods of scaling activities and scope up or down quickly as needed without 'breaking' anything or requiring the equivalent of flag days.
Overmod: Can you imagine all the papers and opinions that will come out after this pandemic is finally over? We do not even have an idea of how long that will take ?.
blue streak 1https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-06/it-s-still-hard-to-predict-who-will-die-from-covid-19
The problem I have with this is that (as with a fairly large amount of stuff from the Magic Mike machine) it ends just at the point its title promised us they'd begin.
They sidestep (probably by not asking enough specialists) the issue of chronic low-level infection, which can be dramatically seen in a non-viral context. It was very early recognized (before the 1970s, as I recall) that in highly traumatic procedures like total hip replacement, very small titers of 'infection' (Nas Eftekhar cited about 200 organisms) that were permitted to act chronically could produce enormous rejection of parts of the implanted hip, and very likely symptoms elsewhere as in sympathetic ophthalmia. This was obviously not a prompt response to fixed bacterial antigens, and while at the time this was partially thought to be related to continuous secretion of 'microorganism' metabolic waste or toxic products, it might as easily be related to continuous mispriming of elements of the immune system on such things as spike proteins, with just the subsequent cascade of interleukins or leukotrienes as we observe in coronaviral infections that proceed to ARDS that has been explained only as following a critical level of established infection.
More 'food for thought' is that, if this mechanism is effective for any reason, it might require nothing more than a periodically-refreshed reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 -- such as would be created by casual contact and careless ingestion of, say, fomite contamination -- to produce a primed hyperreaction that does not self-resolve. This being completely divorced from any considerations of "COVID-19" related to actual viral propagation to dangerous levels, the thing most people have been thinking of as the 'infection'.
Further food for thought is that individuals who have either been misprimed or who will have proceeded to a state of (induced) hyperreaction may have no direct relationship to cohorts who are currently understood as being the 'at-risk' groups for COVID-19 morbidity. So at least some of the revised models of 'social distancing' that keep the at-risk people segregated from the mass of the general population might themselves have to be further revised or reconsidered.
It does seem clear that a reasonable serological test for these sorts of conditions could be fairly easy to derive, though. This might have alternative use in other conditions involving overreaction -- such as some types of vaccine issues, or chronic autoimmune diseases of the more vicious kind.
blue streak 1Can you imagine all the papers and opinions that will come out after this pandemic is finally over?
It'll be a lot. I can further imagine all the give and take and discussions that will accompany various initiatives to ensure this 'never happens again' -- both public and private.
Something I didn't mention is that only a comparatively small fraction of the 'papers and opinions' will be properly scientific. Expect to see lots and lots of the usual self-confirming research any college biochemistry department has on its poster sessions. Lots of anecdotal stories of sickness and recovery, and the wonder nostrums that produced 'cures' (you strangely seldom see the word 'treatment' in this class of work; I wonder why...) and lots of discussions about essential oils and various kinds of toxin cleanses and nutraceutical supplements. Sometimes it is extremely hard to distinguish the science, particularly when it's financed by perceived associated interests, from the junk. But occasionally there will be leads even from the blind squirrels...
Loathe to weigh in but: Will it go the same next time? Absent serious sustained pushback, what do you think?
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