taxicabjesus

What is it that motivates you to continue wearing a mask?

I take note of people who are still masking, but I have compassion for their fear so I don't say anything.

https://www.taxiwars.org/ - this site is mostly composed of my diaries and stories from Kuro5hin.org (RIP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802 ). "I posted at K5 because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193286

My submission of my then-new website got a little time on the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193273

I have a bunch of notes for posts I started but haven't yet finished. The Predicaments of Old People seems important. A Medical Hack Job is about a young woman who couldn't afford the pills the ER doctors had prescribed her.

There have been a few posts since K5 went away. 'False Prophecy' was about the time I became a false prophet. I'd forgotten all about this anecdote until the next time I went out to look at a lunar eclipse. https://www.taxiwars.org/2020/10/false-prophesy.html

One of the earliest findings of the investigations into oxygen that O2 is toxic in excess.

Space-cabin Atmospheres: Oxygen toxicity (1964) (google.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25883728

The Haldane Effect and the Bohr Effect are the central findings that explain the transportation and exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldane_effect / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect

People who hyperventilate exhale too much carbon dioxide, which disrupts the acid/alkaline balance of the blood and makes it harder for the body to use the oxygen available to it.

The Apollo capsules were originally spec'd to use a mixed gas atmosphere. When the capsule got too heavy they switched to using a pure-O2 atmosphere. After the Apollo 1 fire they switched to using an atmospheric mix (80/20 N2/O2) at launch, which gradually changed to pure oxygen as the flights progressed.

Treatment with pure oxygen is not helpful for sick people:

Mortality/morbidity: acutely ill adults liberal vs. conservative Oxygen Tx (2018) (thelancet.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993262

I typed up some notes about oxygen toxicity: https://www.taxiwars.org/2021/06/folly-medical-hyperventilat...

Medicine decided that the antidote to oxygen toxicity didn't need to be used anymore in the mid-1950's.

The more you drive the more you notice things. After a few years in the taxi, while going through the tunnel in central Phoenix, I pointed at the cars in the far-left lanes of the freeway and said to my passenger, "you see that car right there? It's going to change into the next lane, and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes." My passenger was amazed when exactly this happened seconds later.

The Egyptian pyramids are an elephant in the room. Conventional thinking is they're burial chambers built with copper tools and ramps.

But other historians believe they reflect a lost technological sophistication. The pyramids are incredibly precise: perfectly aligned to true north (within ~0.05°), made with millions of 2-70 ton blocks and precise internal engineering for passageways and chambers. Someone recently advocated that there's substantial subterranean infrastructure under the pyramids. The technology to move 70 ton blocks didn't exist again until the 1800's.

One of modern science's ideological straitjackets is Oliver Heaviside's restatement of Maxwell's 20 equations with 20 unknowns into four vector calculus equations. Heaviside's restatements made the math accessible to regular engineers who wanted to build things. But the restatements are arguably a simplification that neutered electromagnetism: https://x.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1964345590604845487 (Grok had a nice answer for "what phenomenon are inadequately explained by Heaviside's four equations?").

The Coral Castle in Florida was a labor of love, built by a single man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle

  The stones are fastened together without mortar. 
  They are set on top of each other using their 
  weight to keep them together. The craftsmanship 
  detail is so fine and the stones are connected 
  with such precision that no light passes through 
  the joints. 

Modern humans are at least 100,000 years old. Most of our earlier civilizations are probably along the coasts of the continents, and were submerged at the end of the last ice age. It's silly to think that technology has not been lost and rediscovered over and over again.

My favorite lie had to do with how there weren't enough ventilators. That one got memory holed relatively early, once the frontline medical workers figured out they'd been tricked into thinking ventilation would be helpful for SARS-CoV-2 patients who were not actually in respiratory distress.

My other favorite lie was that the failed ebola drug remdesivir was helpful for COVID-19. The conspiracists think Remdesivir was used to punish people who declined the mRNA jabs.

The ‘very, very bad look' of remdesivir, the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug - https://www.science.org/content/article/very-very-bad-look-r...

Washington Post: Remdesivir can help keep unvaccinated, high-risk people with covid-19 out of hospitals, study finds - https://www.ihv.org/news/2021-archives/washington-post-remde...

Why Remdesivir Failed: Preclinical Assumptions Overestimate the Clinical Efficacy of Remdesivir for COVID-19 and Ebola https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aac.01117-21

> It helped create the conspiracy culture around COVID.

I think conspiracists saw very clearly what was going on. A dissident scientist I respected said, at the very beginning, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost certainly a product of the UNC's gain-of-function research. He knew the UNC's work had been transferred to Wuhan, China.

U.S. halts funding for new risky virus studies, calls for voluntary moratorium - No grants for flu, SARS, or MERS while government pursues 1-year risk analysis - https://www.science.org/content/article/us-halts-funding-new... [2014]

> This is a similar failure to COVID where they thought lying to the public would make for better outcomes

I'm curious which lies you're referring to. "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" reminded me of the time I had fun with my passenger's ignorance of celestial mechanics. She thought the moon really was done for, but after a few more minutes had passed it started to come back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670

> but ended up sowing distrust.

Because most people eventually caught on that they were being lied to?

There was a time when I was consuming a lot of industrial cheese. I developed a rash on my legs... One day I realized the rash was certainly being caused by my cheap cheese habit. I'm certain it was related to the "vegetarian enzymes" used as an industrial substitute for the traditional animal rennet. I stopped buying the cheap cheese, and my rash went away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet

Contaminants are a common problem in industrial food manufacturing: citric acid (fungal contaminants), vitamin C (heavy metals), and "enzymes" (?).

I'm glad Italians insist their cheeses be made following the traditional methods.

The story is about how medicine assumes that if a little oxygen is good, more is better. But in the real world too much oxygen destroys lungs, and we’re all deteriorated by even a little too much O2.

I, for one, welcome the reconsideration of oxygen anti-therapy.

This is an important story. A lot of people are over-oxygenated by their health care professionals.

A common way that people induce 'too much oxygen' is by hyperventilating. One effect of hyperventilating is that it shrinks the peripheral arteries - in the brain, fingers, toes.

The simplest treatment for hyperventilation is recycling exhaled carbon dioxide with a paper bag.

I put a top-level post on this submission requesting more poll options.

> contentious 'options' which presume malice on the part of "science"

My poll attempted to ascribed malice to the powerful people who use the trappings of science to concentrate wealth. I made a similar comment 2 days ago: "[...] the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053362

> self corrections or false accusations

I went to a seminar around 2004. The speaker mentioned a foundational science mistake from the 1800's. In the past year I've heard this mistake was corrected, but the correction was classified. <shrug>.

There is no official guide to "how to prevent your child from becoming Autistic", so this issue is still open.

Thanks for the feedback.

What if admitting science-mistakes made the weight loss drugs unnecessary? I'm sure the causes of the obesity epidemic could be acknowledged without framing it as a mistake.

One of the neat features of the HN Poll is that I can add more choices. Respond to this comment with your favorite 'science mistake', and I'll consider adding it to the poll.

I'm just a simple former taxi-driver. I went the extra mile for some of my passengers - bailing them out of jail, etc - and made notes about people's struggles with the machine.

The guy who I bailed out - a few years ago his friend shared on facebook that he'd been arrested again. I went to his hearing - he saw me. The judge was very stern with all the other people, but said to my passenger, "you haven't caused any trouble since you were arrested years ago, but you did miss your court date so I have to do something..." She was going to give him 30 days with work release, but he said he'd just miss the next court date so they might as well keep him. I sent him some money for his books, he sent me a post card saying that it meant a lot to have the support of someone on the outside.

> this is not a healthy expression of irony or frustration with the government.

Sometimes all you can do is make fun of your predicament.

I'm about to head out to hustle for a while, will respond to you later tonight.

Not sure what you mean. I hoped to start a discussion on HN about whether the scientific enterprise has been captured by profiteers.

Lots of people are angry about the COVID-19 vaccines, and are no longer getting 'boosted': https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/19/60-of-ame...

I think the character limit for a poll is ~2000 characters, so I couldn't write a whole essay.

> I have yet to see a single non-politician support this behavior.

I think it was Scott Adams' who related to me that Mike Benz has been pointing out the corruption of USAID for a while... https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber

> This entire post is a pretty delusional tirade but this takes the cake.

  "Tongue in cheek" is an idiom that means 
  something is said in a humorous or ironic 
  way, and is not meant to be taken literally.

>the medical establishment has suffered a severe blow to their credibility because the government used their work in vain.

It doesn't help that the medical system has been gamed to concentrate wealth. Doctoring pays well, but doctors are much lower on medicine's economic dogpile than insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

I think Medicine became an important jobs project in the post-NAFTA era because it's an industry that can't be outsourced. The amount spent on medicine has gone through the roof, but the outcomes are the same as they've ever been.

The author of this Ask HN is asking because conventional cancer medicine is not good enough. I think cancer dissidents say the screening programs for early treatment makes the doctors look better by increasing the number of non-fatal cases that are “diagnosed”. But most people who die after a certain age all have non-fatal tumors in their bodies…

> Q: What do you call alternative medicine that works? A: Medicine

Medicine that doesn’t work is grandfathered in to be called Medicine to. I don’t know how standard harmful treatments get retired from active use.

I mentioned your joke in a comment on a submission about stents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14722748

American medicine has a tendency to pay for things that are fantastically expensive, but aren’t really what the patient actually needs. I found this blog post about this phenomenon a few years ago:

Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of “Prasad’s Law” (hcrenewal.blogspot.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728864

I had lots of experiences with people who weren’t helped by the money that was spent on their behalf.

Seems like this was revived via the second-chance system. I noticed it on the front page (1-30) this morning, but when I looked ~two hours later it was #447.

I've sorta followed this doctor's posts for a while. He has some good insights on the deterioration of the medical profession, and its capture by big business. I particularly appreciated his post on the deterioration of the competency of surgeons.

A lot of the comments below seem to not want to acknowledge that the dissidents against the status quo might be more correct in their philosophy for making the most of our lives.

Russia was supposed to rapidly collapse after the sanctions were applied ~2.5 years ago. I think vastly more damage has been done to Britain and the EU’s economies.

I read that Russia has gotten most of the businesses that were abandoned going again.

> This also applies to shorter sentences. Even these can completely turn an offender’s life upside down. You can lose your job, home and social network. And you rarely become a better person during a short stay in jail.

I had a few experiences helping people who were trapped or harmed by Arizona's criminal justice system. I eventually decided Arizona's jails and prisons are make-work programs to remove people from the labor supply.

America's Make-Work Sheriff: The Anachronism of Joseph Arpaio: https://www.taxiwars.org/2017/09/americas-make-work-sheriff-...

Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire: https://www.taxiwars.org/2017/10/ordinary-rendition-public-s...

The second one was about the passenger who remembered me from the night she got the 'catch and release' treatment. Her second taxi trip was almost 2 years after her first trip.

It takes about 7 days of confinement before people begin to develop PTSD...

> 1. Yes, the COVID treatments we're using today are vaccines.

There were efforts to figure out how to treat SARS-CoV-2 with existing safe medications, but these efforts were suppressed.

In the early days Dr. Zelenko treated his obviously-COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. His logic was ‘why let the patient deteriorate while we wait for the test to come back, when we can just start treating now?’ Most of his patients made a full recovery.

Eventually some scam-treatments got approved - remdesivir (“run, death is near”) and… paxlovid were two ineffective treatments.

My introduction to Hallelujah was via Malcolm Gladwell's podcast. A good portion of Season 1, Episode 7 (2016) was dedicated to the evolution of Leonard Cohen's song from 'forgotten B-side track' to the song that is commonly known and covered today.

https://youtu.be/4OKQTl09vCk?t=1180 (link to 19:30) https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/halleluj...

The author of this submission mentions this podcast:

> On his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell presents his theory on two types of artists: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. Conceptual innovators create their best work early on in their careers.

Both this submission and Gladwell's podcast are based on Alan Light's 2014 book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Holy-or-the-Broke... / https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Broken_Hallelujah_Roc...

The easy problems have all been solved. All that’s left is fixing the science-mistakes that were made along the way.

There was a redditor who posted to /r/legaladvice/. One of the responders said it might be carbon monoxide poisoning.

https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_posti...

WBUR did a podcast: https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/03/09/something-wick...

I have an old CO detector in the hallway. I think fire departments have the ability to test these to make sure they still work, but I haven't done this yet.

My quip is supposed to be lighthearted, as the medical industry is obviously not a wealth-transfer scheme to transportation providers. The medical system gets paid regardless of whether their treatments actually help their patients. I don't think doctors are in charge anymore.

The blog post seems to indicate the problem is systemic in the criminal justice system's attempts to integrate Science into its rulings:

> Once convicted, however, defendants in cases of faulty science run up against an anti-scientific defect in the system.

> Legal principles dictate a certain deference to the trial court’s decision. ... the court system would be hopelessly bogged down ... if the losers were entitled to endless rehearings of the facts. With scientific and medical questions, however, it means a reversal of the logic by which science moves.

(note to self: "... there are four primary facets or canons (i.e., rules or principles that guide a field of study) that define the scientific method. They are empiricism, determinism, parsimony, and testability." https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/469...

Interesting article, thanks. This is about the legal aspects of Shaken Baby Syndrome, and how Robert Roberson's was sentenced to death in Texas on the basis of now-obsolete science.

It's almost impossible for the medical profession to admit that mistakes were made, especially when the mistake takes on a life of its own. I guess the judicial system has a similar problem.

I visited /u/rossant's profile, and found a blog post about his book on this subject: https://cyrille.rossant.net/sbsbook/

I decided, circa 2012, that healthcare was a make-work program for us taxi drivers. Sometimes transportation providers would make vastly more taking people to their appointments than the provider would receive for the checkup or the group counseling session. A good voucher fare for us was $50+ ($100+ round trip). I couldn't imagine AHCCCS (Arizona Medicaid) paying more than $40 for a group counseling session. Medicaid probably paid $40-50 for a medical followup appointment.

My theory behind this observation was that as the U.S. gradually de-industrialized post-NAFTA and post-WTO, our politicians leaders used healthcare as a source of jobs that couldn't be outsourced to Mexico or Asia.

From my on-the-ground perspective, an important consideration in the US' poor health outcomes is addiction. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39071316