Everyone in the VC community who helped elect President Trump is partially responsible for each child that suffers and dies from a vaccine-preventable disease due to this action.
Hence the schadenfreude.
It's one thing to be wrong with everyone. It's another to be wrong after a ton of people said "This is a dumb idea."
The Citizens United decision allowed capital to have a much larger influence on the programming of our political media.
Obama, many faults and all, has a great quote on this topic: ~"If I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either!"
That is why Trump was right about him shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. He was smart enough to tap into this undercurrent that I was unaware of, perhaps due to my youth.
Yes, we grow into that as we turn into toddlers, then hopefully we grow out of it. One of our simple core algo's is categorization, but it's just a base algo which came out of base survival techniques from the days of yore.
> They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.
This is true to some extent, and very sad. However, it does not apply to everyone in my experience. It only applies to those who see the world as a zero-sum game. If I understand the last few hundred years correctly, thanks to technology, we do not live in a zero-sum world, so it's an obsolete concept. Once you learn that, it overrides those old base algo's, if you are in a social circle that allows this. However, those base categorizations do appeal to our base instincts, so it's an effective political campaigning technique for those politicians who have no shame.
I ain't young no more, and the biggest change in US politics that I have seen is that being shameless has become normalized, again.
There are many examples of when super racist/sexist/political people get to talk with those who they once hated, they drop all those previous trainings, and just see them as fellow humans, and even friends. This is why those who use the obsolete categorization ideology as their entire identity don't want you to go to university, or travel, where you might learn all that.
this feels like missing the forest for the trees.
racism, sexism, classism etc are structural issues. individual prejudices are fear-based levers that are manipulated by bad actors in order to serve economic goals.
it doesn't appear to be difficult to manipulate people using these levers when you're also responsible for the dogshit economic and social conditions they find themselves in.
And ample access to 1000x more lies than truth. For the people who are media illiterate, facts don’t matter and truth is replaced by confirmation of priors.
If not, the end state looks not great. How have you dealt with this reality for your own personal/family planning? Asking for me.
So is your suggestion that medical policy based on balancing humours is actually effective altruism?
Our current policies favor fearmongering and cherry-picking to influence people to seek medical treatment that they don't need and come with side effects.
The fact that Doctors get paid a kickback for high child VAX percentages alone is enough to make me toss out the whole idea.
Everyone: “we can tell you’re an entitled dbag.”
VC: “well now I’m going to act like an entitled dbag and it’s your fault.”
- Me paraphrasing his actual interview. You know who I’m talking about.
No, we don't, because not all of us watch the same media or follow the same threads.
In this case though I guess it's just hard for me to recognise how much the focus of this site has shifted and that people can come here that seemingly have no interest in startups/tech/vc.
It's pretty easy to come across this site if you're just generally interested in tech stuff (I think everybody I talk to knows exactly what I refer to if I say "the orange site"), and if you're someone who's interested in tech but not particularly plugged into things like the mechanics of startups or business, well, there's a lot on here that's not related to that.
Also, I didn't really see the connection to the US election and vaccines.
All of them?
Sorry, don't know, plz tell us!
But hey, what do I know, maybe you're 80yo and working on a short time horizon.
And this is coming from someone who abhors that business model and everyone in it.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/is...
Oh and to be clear my attitude towards antivaxxers is burn by /slow/ fire, but still.
It’s incredible when I read this sort of comment, and then I realise that the comment is so badly ill informed that I need to respond. But it does make me wonder what sources of information the other person is reading…
Perhaps you were thinking about compensation from the government, but the original poster was talking about actually holding Pfizer and Moderna liable.
People still have an avenue to sue for harm -- they can sue the government.
The government took on that liability in exchange for preventing the spread of a highly pathogenic, novel pandemic with moderate mortality, thereby allowing return to normal life, with fewer deaths, faster.
Which part of that was a bad idea?
VI claims are still paid (faster, with lower standard of evidence, and cheaper to everyone involved). Lawsuits that go through court involve law firms and the investigations become extremely expensive for everyone.
Manufacturers (and rhetorical supply+delivery chain) are monitored by medical orgs and the federal government to ensure the doses remain safe, after passing the initial trials. These review systems catch incidents like the Samoa measles vaccine incident (in which a few nurses were at fault for injecting from the wrong bottles, which RFKJr was on the wrong side of) and other incidents where some vials were contaminated. Unless a VI plaintiff can prove gross negligence, the outcome is better under the current system. If they can prove gross negligence, they can still take a manufacturer (or any other defendant involved in the supply chain) to court.
The government decided that vaccines are a public health net positive and designed to current system to spread the risk across manufacturers and the government to ensure the cost of litigation didn’t eliminate this very useful tool.
Edit: evidently it's more complex than that. The COVID vaccines are covered under the 2005 Prep Act instead.