243 karma · joined August 18, 2018
Now I'm really pleasantly surprised at how good the descent mk3 is which I wear all day and there's also inreach etc. Garmin products are really safe buys when it comes to fitness devices. Other smart watches suffer mostly from the software side whereas Garmin connect syncs well and has good UX.
Gotta say it just feels nice to be able to go through a couple of those smoothly. I think that actually relieved some latent stress I've been having all this time and made me more at east even at work. Feels good to know that I'm ready when the time comes, even if not now.
And then there's the completely over the top narrative building based on non-evidence (which also swings wildly based on current trends), legends about mavericks doing secret fact finding missions online etc... stuff that should stay in a bad movie script.
At the end of the day I still think the facts will come up with enough time. If for example the hypothesis is that it's through GoF research, then a group of experts can examine the plausibility and the genomic evidence, try to replicate some of the possible steps etc. Real world research is hard and incremental, it's not done with black magic no one can find out about.
With all that said...the amount of academic freedom even within this flawed system is still greater than most other places I know of. Perhaps if you are a distinguished researcher working on your own terms and funded by one of the big tech companies things are better.
To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of positive samples etc etc. It's clearly still in the early stages of discoveries so all theories are just theories. That said I don't expect this to remain a mystery forever. It will just take time, because eventually the natural origins will be pinned down and reasonable chain of events of first spread will be identified.
By current accounts the vaccines will still work against this variant. So the last thing you want to happen is for the virus to catch the vulnerables in the last moment before they are vaccinated and essentially renders the whole vaccination program ineffective.
Of course there's the debate of this whole pandemic about the harm to economy and people's lives etc. To me the majority of the damage has already been done and can't be undone. So I'd like the measures to be taken to end this ASAP, even if they are even stricter, and to mitigate the harm as much as possible. But I highly doubt that's what's going to happen. The actual policy effects may be neither here nor there.
I don't see any reason they cannot do that. It will hurt their bottom line for sure, but it's completely reasonable imo.
In particular, I think this idea of trading your data is easy to understand and communicate. Also, could it be the case that as soon as companies are forced to offer a price for your data a lot of the predatory data collection schemes may not be profitable enough as a result? I imagine you can't just make a crappy app and start collecting user info en masse because it now incurs a real cost. Also I think data should be traded precisely where every data point generated should be worth something. Not just as a one time thing.
From what I've read it is the first large scale adoption of mRNA vaccines so the really long term risks are less known. That said, theoretically mRNA vaccines should have a lot of advantages. Later in 2021 there may be a few other options for vaccines to take as well, so I'd do some research at least.
Most social media already obey GDPR for European users (I suspect TikTok included), so having this law in the US will benefit every user everywhere by forcing companies to treat everyone uniformly with a higher level of protection by default due to the majority of their userbase being covered by such laws.