I assume that you mean "censored" and not "censured" (different thing), but it was not, in fact, censored. It was entirely in the open.
However, the information was definitely not distilled effectively for the average layperson. I remember thinking at the time that the CDC was seriously ham-handed when it came to communicating with the general public. I even initially blamed the Trump administration, but when the Biden administration took over, they did not improve communication either. My conclusion since then is that the CDC is dominated by academic types--which is largely appropriate given their mission--but that they also put academic types in PR roles, which was a disaster.
Hardly. I heard this “questioning the dominant narrative” over and over again. Disagreement is not censure. As far as I am aware, the only people who faced any penalties at all were doctors who went so far outside the realm of evidence-based medicine that they caused demonstrable harm and therefore had their licenses revoked. Which is good.
I believed in the lab leak theory so for me getting the vaccine was a no brainer. I could get infected by one of two things developed in a lab, only one of which had clinical trails on humans. I went with the clinically tested option.
perfectly understandable and you’ve described a reasonable decision-making process
any reasonable person should be able to recognize that the alternative hypothesis was not an equally accepted decision
many people chose severe penalties rather than participate in a sudden worldwide field trial of mRNA vaccination by indemnified pharmaceutical companies, and in some parts of the world were not even given that choice.
GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.
> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,
By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.
You don’t need to loudly and publicly say no to Roskomnadzor’s extrajudicial notices, by recognising them you’re giving them more legitimacy than they deserve by acknowledging at all rather than treating the notice as the spam it is.
Just because the UK is modelling themselves in the same image doesn’t mean that the tactic for dealing with extrajudicial censorship attempts is different.
The Granite act is a direct result of this loud response. Being loud means that U.S. politicians notice, a U.S. under secratary notices, which means a stronger and more legally binding response is possible. Legislature and foreign diplomacy is involved not just some idealistic whining about jurisdiction.
Exactly, this is reaching the level where the US government needs to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on the UK to cease. Raising the profile of the issue will help make that happen.
I mean I don't particularly agree but I can understand the sentiment.
That's not what I'm saying just harms his clients though. There's obvious (almost entirely domestic, probably counter productive as to UK politics) lobbying value in that. It's the part where he sends confessions back to the UK regulators privately that just harms his clients.
The high-profile, public, Arkell vs. Pressdram type response increases public awareness.
Without that, he’s just a guy with a blog, and can’t effect any real change. Whether it harms or benefits his clients or not is likely a question of politics. If these responses drum up enough attention that his GRANITE act gets passed, that’s arguably a better outcome for each client jointly and severally than just ignoring the letters.
At the gym I go to, there are a lot of college-age kids. I overhear them talking about getting on Ritalin or Adderall to help them study. Not because they really need it, it's just seen as a "performance hack" to get an advantage. They talk about what doctor they went to and how easy it was to get a prescription.
Have you ever taken a decent dose of an amphetamine? It isn't going to make you smarter but it will almost certainly boost your energy and ability to get stuff done.
The same is true for every individual person who takes it. At some dose it helps and at other does it doesn't.
And in the gym, it raises your heart rate so that hurts exercise, but without it I can't do any cardio because I get so bored 5 minutes in I have to stop.
you seem to be committing the error of believing that the problem here is just that they’re not selling what people want to buy, instead of identifying the clear intention to _create_ the market.
There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.
I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).
Bitcoin and other crypto coins have a practical use. You can use them to buy whatever is being sold on the darkweb with the main product categories being drugs and guns. I honestly believe much of the valuation of Crypto is tied to these marketplaces.
And by "dog feces," I assume you mean fiat currency, correct?
Cryptocurrency solves the money-printing problem we've had around the world since we left the gold standard. If governments stopped making their currencies worthless, then bitcoin would go to zero.
This seems to be almost purely bandwagon value, like preferring Coca-Cola to some other drink. There are other blockchains that are better technically along a bunch of dimensions, but they don't have the mindshare.
Bitcoin is probably unkillable. Even if were to crash, it won't be hard to round up enough true believers to boost it up again. But it's technically stagnant.
True, but then so is a lot of "tech". There were certainly, at least equivalent, social applications before and all throughout Facebooks dominance, but like Bitcoin the network effect becomes primary, after a minimum feature set.
For Bitcoin, it doesn't exactly seem to be a network effect? It's not like choosing a chat app because that's what your friends use.
Many other cryptocurrencies are popular enough to be easily tradable and have features to make them work better for trade. Also, you can speculate on different cryptocurrencies than your friends do.
Technically stagnant is a good thing; I'd prefer the term technically mature. It's accomplished what it set out to do, which is to be a decentralized, anonymous form of digital currency.
The only thing that MIGHT kill it is if governments stopped printing money.
Beanie Babies were trading pretty well, too, although it wasn't quite "solving sudokus for drugs", so I guess that's why they didn't have as much staying power.
Those are the main innovations tied to crypto trading. They do indeed have little to do with the blockchain or bitcoin itself, and do apply to any asset.
There are actually several startups whose pitch is to bring back those innovations to equities (note that this is different from tokenized equities).
Uh…
So the argument here is that
anticipated future value == meaningful value today?
The whole cryptocurrency world requires evangelical buy-in. But there is no directly created functional value other than a historic record of transactions and hypothetical decentralization. It doesn’t directly create value.
It’s a store of it - again, assuming enough people continue to buy into the narrative so that it doesn’t dramatically deflate when you need to recover your assets. States and other investors are helping make stability happen to maintain it as a value store, but you require the story propagating to achieve those ends.
You’re wasting your breath. Bitcoin will be at a million in 2050 and you’ll still get downvoted here for suggesting it’s anything other than a stupid bubble that’s about to burst any day now.
unfortunately that line of reasoning was so censured that people started weaponizing it
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