Isn't the specific trade law being broken related to arms control and dual-use technology?
IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.
It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
How often do you think companies are in the habit of doing things for your convenience?
Not who you replied to, but requiring me to install your app or create an account is usually going to mean I skip your thing unless I'm really motivated (or forced basically) to use it.
Vaccines that have a large impact on transmission and infection are there not just for you but for your community.
The covid shots were good against hospitalization and death in older folks, but they were not great at preventing infection or transmission (despite what you may have gleaned from the speakers blaring ads in every public setting for all that time).
You can fall back to the "flooding the hospitals" argument, that works a little better here.
You're misinterpreting data here. You are conflating the fact that the clinical trials didn't measure infection/transmission (which is very hard to do in a clinical trial) with the distinct claim that they didn't reduce transmission in reality.
The vaccines were extremely effective at reducing transmission during the first waves of COVID, where such an intervention was most valuable. And due to viral growth dynamics, even small reductions in transmission yield big net outcomes.
Later waves made the vaccine much less effective at reducing transmission, but still highly effective at reducing hospital utilization which is (despite your snarky aside), extremely valuable. Fatality rates doubled when ERs hit full capacity.
All I'm saying is if you sum up the time (between vaccine release and today) that a person was strongly protected from covid infection and transmission, it's a relatively small portion of that time.
Thats my pushback against gp's argument that you have to give this thing to your young kids to protect me.
I suspect that you and GP and GGP are talking about different time scales.
Vaccinating your children for COVID during peak COVID was the right thing to do both for them and for the adults they interact with.
Vaccinating your children for COVID today is much lower ROI for them and anyone around them.
Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
I struggle to think of a decision or conversation where the relevant metric is "what % of time from vaccination until today were you protected" and I doubt that's what GP was discussing either.
> Vaccinating your children in general is very much the right thing to do, both for them and for anyone around them.
Isn't this kinda like saying medicating your children in general is very much the right thing to do?
Like it's obviously one of those things that everyone expects you to just agree with directionally, but the actually correct answer is no, there is no in general. All drugs have a context where they make sense. E.g. you're probably not vaccinating your kids for rabies, unless you live in an animal sanctuary or something. MMR, sure.
It actually seems pretty questionable to me that it was ever a net benefit to your average young kid to get the covid shots.
No there actually is in general and it's the same exact way in which there's generally good guidance for medicating your children: they're called evidence-backed guidelines.
The contexts in which drugs make sense is captured by the clinical guidelines.
And sure, it is arguably questionable whether there was ever a net benefit to an average young kid to get a COVID vaccine. However that is a distinct claim from "it never made sense to give kids COVID vaccines." There was certainly a point in time in which a logical interpretation of the information available at the time indicated that kids should get vaccinated. The risks were (correctly) understood to be near-zero and the benefits were (arguably incorrectly) understood to be significant.
Someone who, in early 2021, decided against vaccinating their children was making a decision that was not indicated by the best-available information at that time.
Someone who bets on Red doesn't get to claim they were "correct" in betting on Red even if Red comes up, and certainly not if Green comes up (arguably neutral outcome).
This is the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument. It works in a world where you have trustworthy institutions and its safe to just outsource your decision-making to the authorities.
Your interpretation of events might be that a collective of all well meaning people just got it wrong, and that's your right. A lot of people ended up with different conclusions, like the machine did what it does and made a lot of money, the truth be damned.
Not really. It's the "making decisions based on best-available evidence is good, even if every once in a while it leads you astray."
You're more than welcome to read the evidence they use to create their policies. If you have evidence that is of higher quality than that which "the authorities" are using, then you should depend on that!
But... you almost certainly don't have higher quality evidence than they do. That's the fundamental problem.
If you think that you do, then you too could actually make a fuckton of money with that information. But again: you don't have superior information.
I don't think people even got it wrong. They got it correct with the information available, and they for the most part got it right even in retrospect.
I did read a lot of evidence available at the time. It's why I opted to skip the vaccine for myself given that I had already recovered shortly before the shots were available. That decision was very at odds with authoritative guidance at the time. You'd think I was a damn leper, yet that decision seems to have held up pretty well.
I also frequently tested before any gatherings, and avoided contact when I had any kinds of symptoms, test or not. I saw plenty of people figure they had gotten the shots so why not go out with the sniffles?
"Best information" and what was blasted out of the TV or considered "common sense" at the time I think have quite a bit of daylight between them.
What gives you the idea that a low-risk person opting not to get the vaccine is "at odds with authoritative guidance?" Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. Not sure that can be pinned on public health authorities. People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
Answer: no. Go get tested, and if positive, don't gather.
Yes, agreed that people were listening primarily to a game of telephone and vibes and not actually reading any of the linked PDFs or listening to the actual words spoken by actual public health officials firsthand, and then they (like you are now) were confused about what the actual guidance said.
I misspoke, right at rollout when supplies were short, they did say you could wait. Once they had enough to sell, everyone who didn't jump in line was a grandma killer.
> Yes, I would bet that it made you feel like a leper, but that's because people (correctly) think that it signals something about your attitude toward the rest of society. ... People who hold open the door to the cold are assholes and frequently treated as such.
This is asinine. There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else, and by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Also, I made the choice with my doctor's agreement.
> by testing and isolating like I was, I was doing likely the best you could possibly do for the folks around me.
Short of vaccination yes, you were. But also people have no way to actually trust anything you say, whereas even saying that you aren't vaccinated (again, correctly) indicates quite a lot about some combination of your information, selfishness, or care for others.
For example, if you had gone around thinking or saying "I'm not vaccinated because prior infection protections me (and therefore you)" you would have been wrong. That's why people's alarm bells go off when you go around saying that you're not vaccinated.
This entire conversation is a validation of their heuristics. You're acting like public health authorities said X and then they didn't, or acting like there's no evidence of Y when there is, and then saying "see I didn't get vaccinated!" is exactly what everyone was cuing into: this is almost certainly either a confused or selfish person, or both.
You might consider reading the actual Kentucky study (as I did at the time) and looking at the limitations. This and the one in October are exactly the kind of shit that would get published and then reports like your link would way overstate what they were actually capable of showing.
Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
You're misunderstanding btw, I didn't go around telling anyone but my closest friends and family. I wasnt about to out myself as a heretic when the likely biggest propaganda campaign in history was going on (pandemic of the unvaccinated, etc). It was mostly in hn threads on studies like the ones you posted where I would say anything about it.
And yes, all studies have limitations, especially observational studies done in the middle of an emergency.
Here's your claim: "There was never any indication in the data that a previously recovered person posed any kind of heightened threat to anyone else"
That is quite obviously false.
If you believe there was superior data available at the time, please share it. Otherwise, yes that is exactly what the data showed (imperfect as all data is).
> Eventually things calmed down enough that studies could actually be published showing the efficacy of a prior infection without risking careers.
Like which studies? (Not that more recent studies could've possibly time-traveled to inform your decision-making in the past, of course).
A reasonable prior (which my doctor ascribed to) was that immunity after recovery from an infection with a coronavirus would be pretty durable and effective, and you can find plenty of reporting to support the effectiveness early on.
To believe otherwise would take some solid evidence, and maybe the Kentucky study is enough to convince you, but it was not enough to convince me (or apparently my doctor, though we didn't talk about that).
It even said this: Finally, this is a retrospective study design using data from a single state during a 2-month period; therefore, these findings cannot be used to infer causation.
So maybe "any indication" was too strong. How about any convincing indication?
There were others as well, I was following this very closely because it seemed pretty important to not be wrong, and all of the messaging was very insistent.
The study you linked is evidence that prior infection reduces the rate of reinfection. Yes, this would be surprising if it were not true.
Your prior claim was that prior infection is equivalent to or superior to vaccination (i.e. relying on prior infection was not "heightened risk"). That was, and remains, completely false.
"Conclusions: Naturally acquired immunity confers stronger protection against infection and symptomatic disease caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 2-dose vaccine-indued immunity."
During May–November 2021, case and hospitalization rates were highest among persons who were unvaccinated without a previous diagnosis. Before Delta became the predominant variant in June, case rates were higher among persons who survived a previous infection than persons who were vaccinated alone. By early October, persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone."
"That was, and remains, completely false."
Would you like to amend your claim? You might have an argument if you stick to "could have been false for short periods of time after people were freshly vaccinated", but otherwise that's pretty indefensible.
Ah, one of those "everybody knows" argument that is on the level of "everybody knows that Napoleon was short".
It's not completely wrong but it ignores important context. The part you are leaving unsaid is that the vaccine reduced transmission even if it didn't prevent it completely. 80% reduction is a significant amount.
Wearing masks on top of that was the sensible thing to do.
Stasis leads to increasing entropy and a sclerotic inability to adapt to changing circumstances. You're either growing or dying: there is no middle ground.
It's free if you don't bring up things that should technically have been a dedicated own appointment.
The idea behind physicals is they're considered preventative care... catching problems early, often before there's any overt symptoms. For example, checking your cholesterol and A1c levels before they progress to heart failure or diabetes.
Once you're showing symptoms, you've left the realm of preventative care and it's now diagnostic/treatment for a established issue.
(ACA only provides 100% free coverage for visits that are 100% within the "preventative care" box.)
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