Not just R&D. This is how manufacturing works in general. Nobody is like "here's the CAD, go ahead and send me 50,000 units! I'm sure it will be fine."
114 karma · joined August 6, 2022
But two points remain. 1. Had they been able to sustain this Ponzi scheme to IPO, he would be celebrated as a tech-god, as opposed to facing hard time. 2. The VCs aren't required to disclose their sales of crypto. My guess is they made money of this clown, directly at the expense of all the FTC users he fleeced. As long as that keeps happening, this sort of thing will never stop.
Keeping in mind these are fat-tailed distributions. So an R naught of 2 is a estimate of a true R naught, and because using sample averages to estimate means (true R naught is a mean) is unstable (the fatter the tail, the less moments of the distribution there are), once the reported number starts getting upwards of 2, the less confidence you can have that that reported number represents the true R naught. You have know idea if the superspreaders are infecting 50 or 500 people.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we were seeing R naughts estimates at 2.5. That's shockingly high. People were right to take extreme members in the face of that kind of uncertainty.
These people enforcing their values with 20-20 hindsight when the decisions were made given limited data at the time are causing harm to our collective ability to make decisions in emergencies.
Now, due to social pressures, aged parents are expected to literally give all their wealth to their children so they can buy a house, invest in some get-rich-quick scheme, or pay for childcare/education for grandkids. The pressure is even higher to do so for sons, who have trouble attracting wives if they don't have a house (recall there are less women than men in China).
If, given that donation, their children can buy a home, they move in and behave as live-in childcare for grandkids, while their children work 80-hour weeks to pay off their debts.
Under the guise of filial piety and "being taken care of", the elderly are under high pressure to give both their wealth and autonomy to their adult children. That loss of autonomy matters; if you get sick, you have to rely on your children to navigate through and pay for the healthcare. This may include getting approval to spend money from a son-in-law or daughter-in-law who doesn't much like you (despite their filial obligation to take care of you) and is thinking the money is better spent on more tutoring for the grandkids (in the hyper-competitive education system) or paying down the mortgage.
In the former case, a positive outcome is expected and therefore negative outcomes are in a sense less tolerable, especially since a false positive would lead to people repeatedly microdosing over an extended period of time, to their long-term detriment.
In the latter case, a "negative experience" does not preclude getting the desired results. And an acute negative experience in a one-time dose may be tolerable when contrasted with the long-term severity of the pathology it is meant to treat.