Not quite when it comes to stopping the epidemic, because transmission seems to be highly correlated to viral load and thus to severity as well.
2,422 karma · joined October 26, 2011
The problem is that AZ had also promised the UK it would have priority over the goods produced on its soil :
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/health-pharma/dragging-a...
:)
Anecdote : I live near a busy high street in London and went out for my daily lockdown exercise at around 6pm today.
About 10% of the "highly educated population", as you say, was wearing a mask. Even more worrying, if you looked through the windows of estate agencies and other such ""essential"" shops, it was exactly 0% indoors.
To people outside the UK reading this : supermarkets here have only made face coverings mandatory a couple of weeks ago ("unless you tell us you're exempt", of course) because the government finally asked them nicely to.
All these months, their CEOs have been emailing us bullshit newsletters about how "your safety is important to us in these unprecedented times", and to that effect they were politely asking customers to "keep your distance" and "wash your hands" and "follow local guidance about face coverings" (i.e. "none"). Meanwhile their employees were free to spend their whole shift unmasked and potentially filling the air with virus, getting their colleagues and customers sick : that was totally cool. And no mention of any effort regarding store ventilation or aerosol risk either.
There is no enforcement of lockdown whatsoever, except for the most egregious cases of partying. It all seems to be based on a gentlemen's agreement, except there seems to be very few gentlemen left indeed. It is all so hypocritical.
This situation is in stark contrast with what I hear from friends & family on the continent. Last time I was in Paris for instance, mask adherence was probably 80% in the street and 99% inside shops. And the French are not exactly known to be fond of rules.
So yeah, B.1.1.7 probably didn't help, the government has probably f**d up on everything except the vaccination programme, but the behaviour of the population alone is in my view, more than enough to explain the terrible UK death/cases figures.
The way the CS and genetics concepts map with each other is really fascinating and thought-provoking.
How would a curious engineer go about learning more about this particular "computer architecture" ?
Going further, is there a realistic career path for someone with a software engineering background to retrain, pivot and meaningfully contribute to research in this area ?
By meaningful I don't just mean the obvious role of building software tools for genetics engineering & research, but actually writing those RNA bits and designing vaccines or other similar items.
Would you need to basically start from scratch as a biology or medical undergrad before working your way up to a PhD, or are there interesting jobs at the crossroads where a previous career as an engineer might be an asset ?
That's incorrect. There was a dialer on later versions of Minitel. And while you could technically set up a V23 BBS-like server behind a regular phone line to talk to Minitel terminals, the whole business model relied on the use of premium short numbers (361X) whose revenue was shared between France Telecom and service providers.
It was absolutely an App Store model and fortunes were made at that time.
This is why the idea of chasing herd immunity without a vaccine has always been misguided
Several years ago I saw a Facebook ad for an online coaching program for aspiring music producers.
It was exactly what I needed at the time, but I had no idea that someone had put something like this together, and I would never have independently thought of googling this. Instead, I relied on music production tutorials on the one hand, and generic productivity advice on the other hand, and assumed that was the best help available out there.
That is just my anecdote, but I'm sure everyone here has their "how could I possibly live without this before" product or service.
Advertising can be useful, and the more targeted, the less obnoxious.
Do you know any store that adds a line showing their margin on the customer receipt ?
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DevOps/SRE is my core skillset, but I'm a "T-shaped" engineer who can help with technology vision, systems design, CI/CD and operational best practices, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, tackling performance bottlenecks & technical debt, and quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology. I also have keen awareness of product & business matters.
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Be aware that FranceSoir is not a reputable source, you could liken it to the UK's Daily Mail. And Covexit also looks like a French conspiracist website set up by Pr Raoult's fans.
Sources matter in this debate because populists across the world (and especially in France with controversial Pr. Raoult) are championing hydroxychloroquine with inexplicable passion.
It fits their conspiracist view that the truth about cheap, easily accessible treatments has been hidden so that big pharma could sell more expensive drugs (the news about dexamethasone destroys that argument)
Much like for climate change deniers, you always see the same few rogue scientists and news outlets, and I could immediately spot which side your comment was on just by looking at the links.
Driving the Mac off a cliff would alienate developers and have serious repercussions on the iOS ecosystem as well.
Why do you think Apple still builds Pro apps like Logic and FCP ? They are almost certainly losing money given their ridiculously low price point, but they help with brand image and keeping the Mac the go-to platform for creatives. There’s indirect value in that.
“Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, ‘Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out.’”
“That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far. That’s easy to do.”
- Barack Obama
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-ca...
"stress of losing its home" = direct deaths by nuclear ? That may be the actual insult to intelligence :)
Both are indirect deaths of course. The only difference is perception : this is similar to the discrepancy between the much better air travel safety record compared to driving, and people being irrationally scared of flying.
Even assuming your indirect deaths figure is true, we'd still be talking about 2000 deaths in a single incident triggered by a natural catastrophe (most nuclear plants aren't in highly seismic zones), of which there have been two in ~50 years of nuclear power.
That's in contrast to 23.000 yearly deaths in Europe alone, from air pollution from coal alone.
We could stop the math there, but what about the death toll from displacement and migrations caused by climate change ? Or actually, the existential threat it poses to the human race ?
In practical terms that means years of Covid19-style lockdown.
We don't have time to wait for a breakthrough in battery storage or carbon recapture. We have a solution now and it's nuclear power. It's a bit late for starting a nuclear programme now, but countries with current a nuclear power capacity (including Germany) should absolutely delay or cancel phasing it out until climate change is solved.
It's impossible to go 100% renewables unless there's a breakthrough in battery storage.
By the time that happens, it will be too late for climate change. That's why phasing out nuclear without having any other solid low carbon plan was irresponsible.
I guess Wikipedia doesn't have any credibility left then. Most of the casualties were from the tsunami : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
> "but estimated 10.000 deaths" part is also false.
Actually you are right on this one, my mistake. It's 23.300 premature deaths each year across Europe, not 10.000 : https://endcoal.org/health/
And here's the source for German plants : https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-lignite-plants-e...
https://www.electricitymap.org/map
As I write this, the UK's intensity is 326 gCO₂eq/kWh, which is nothing to write home about.
This is better than the worst European offender (coal-loving Poland : 652g) as well as Baltic countries, the Netherlands and Germany (373).
But it's far from the best in class : Nordic countries (around 20-30, thanks to hydro) or for a more comparable country, France (around 60, thanks to nuclear)
Germany is interesting because it consistently has one of the worst carbon intensity figures of all developed countries, in spite of a record-setting share of renewables that its green activists like to boast about, and hundreds of billions of € in subsidies poured into them in the past 20 years.
That's of course the consequence of its decision to phase out nuclear power in the early 2000s. Wind/solar are intermittent and there's no way around that (battery storage isn't nearly mature enough).
That leaves 4 options for handling the base load : nuclear, hydro, gas or coal. Only 2 of those are low-carbon. And if you don't have the geography for hydro (like the Nordics do) but still decide to go nuclear-free for political reasons, guess what you're left with ?
IIRC, German coal power plants have 7 spots in the top 10 worst air pollution emitters across the EU. Coal-related air pollution causes an estimated 10.000 extra deaths each year across the continent. Radiation caused one direct death in Fukushima. Thanks, Die Grüne.
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Beyond infrastructure, I'm a "T-shaped" engineer who can help with technology vision, systems design, backend architecture, 12Factor best practices, technical operations, mentoring and general engineering wisdom. I excel at understanding short vs long-term trade-offs, tackling performance bottlenecks & technical debt, and quickly learning and assessing new pieces of technology. I also have keen awareness of product & business matters.
Available mainly as a freelancer for up to 3-4 days/week (or full time for short-term projects). I may also consider employment in a principal or co-founding role for the right company.