Meanwhile the current administration is actively taking formerly publicly available data sets that are critical for research offline.

Once you know about it, there's also a lot of symbolic shorthand for recognition and the like.

Honoring a beloved medieval art historian professor of mine:

"It's more properly the Bayeux Embroidery"

Yeah - I don't want AI writing "notes" in the academic sense, but minutes.

Of course the problem with this for me (I'm a state employee) is that said transcript is a public record.

Sarah Taber has given some interesting talks about this - the short version is there is probably a fair amount of outbreaks caused by small farms, they just don't have the reach to be detected.

The FoodNet thing, while bad, has a bit of nuance in the system was not meant to do outbreak detection, so likely wouldn't have helped here.

But it does cripple our ability to ask if this was a one-off, or if we're seeing long term trends that should be worrisome.

It would have made identifying the source trivial. Instead we had waves of confused and confusing reports.

This. As an infectious disease epidemiologist, the number of people who will work their way into laboratory confirmed case reports is a small fraction of the total number of people impacted.

You are almost certainly not reflected in those numbers.

Honestly, I think we would do well to dispose of both "founder" and "startup".

We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".

They are not the same. Per VC culture, small business owner is a looser, tunning lifestyle business. They produce useful products in competitive markets and nurture relationship with customers.

Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.

Why, in particular, above any other aspect of society?

In contrast, I loved biology and felt its applications call to me, and it took me like five years after struggling through calculus to go "Oh, that's what that's for."