I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
>
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has to be made against the president that was in charge at the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of Jail Free Card".
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
It is approaches like that which gives some hope to the future. War crimes are indeed something which should never be allowed or overlooked. Being a political leader doesn't make people immune to criticism, but rather should be someone held to a higher expectation.
Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.
International law does not apply to the leaders of the western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress poor nations even further.
This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different.
Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US.
At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than COVID.
You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.
Immunity rate, not vaccination rate. This is why everybody ended up catching COVID, often multiple times, regardless of how much they injected themselves with. Whereas, measles, with an ostensibly higher spread rate, was already on its way out before vaccines were introduced with fewer than 1 new case per 500 people - far below even basic fertility rates. It's because infection with measles is a nice mixture of relatively low risk and providing lifetime immunity. Beyond that, herd immunity is a hand-wavy measurement about statistically preventing perpetual spread within a population, it says much less about individual susceptibility.
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz Haber did not personally save countless millions with his discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved there as well.
Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-Bosch.
It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.
Please not that this was in relation to whether or not a general doctor saves lives… A lot of work is indirect.
The Haber–Bosch process was never a two‑man mission to “feed the world.” Haber devised a laboratory method to fix nitrogen, and Bosch led the first industrial‑scale implementation, but neither of them was personally producing, optimizing, transporting, and applying fertilizer across the globe. Turning that reaction into most of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer required teams of chemists, engineers, metalworkers, factory operators, agronomists, logistics workers, and farmers, and an entire century of industrial expansion. If it truly were a two‑person accomplishment, we would only need a handful of farmers per country, which is obviously not how agriculture or industry work.
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
Maybe not, but one can always converse curiously and ask them what they meant. It's nicer to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
Oh really? If you, too, were being sarcastic, you have no business raising "my replies ended in question marks" as a defense, because you weren't actually asking a question, you were making a claim, and the question mark is purely decorative. That is also bad faith discussion. Which is really the core problem with the whole "just asking questions" thing, you start with ambiguous question marks, and retreat to whichever meaning is tactically expedient when challenged.
Meanwhile, I have no problem admitting that my question mark was decorative, and acknowledging my claim that you are engaging in bad faith discussion.
The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical components were all there:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle
3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
4. turbo fuel pumps
5. supersonic airframe
6. guidance system (although primitive)
The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.
In the real world we so far just managed to keep space free of military weapons not because they are expensive, but because of treaties. I just don't expect those to last much longer.
And frankly I never looked into the concept, but why do you think, a space base tungsten penetrator would be way more expensive, than a nuke on a missile?
The idea as proposed in various places is a very large multi-ton vehicle. He chose to focus on trivia. Pretty common for Elon fans.
Humans are pretty clever at devising ways to kill each other. The Russians put a garbage can of concrete on a ersatz ballistic missile on a terror strike against Ukraine. Like you said, these things don’t exist because of treaties.
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".
Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.
Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.
Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
Well, unfortunately I still don’t have access to the hyper sophisticated god like AI that you, in your immense intellect, created, Michael. So I had to use a lesser one.
Of I did though, I’m sure my answer to your - extremely snarky and intelligent - remark world be a text that would stand in the shoulders of giants, together with Ulysses, The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid.
Oh, no Michael, I’m sure, that in your infinite acumen, you know this and just want to spare us, lesser mortals, from the despairing truth. But I know the truth Michael, I know.
They are not just pedophiles, they are the pedophile lizard people Michael. Oh, the horror! The horror!
I must have forgotten that Elon actually is the original founder of Tesla and not a phony. At best he's their money guy.
Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.
Yes , he does. And making fun of people who stutter isn’t a good look.
I will take the word of the world’s foremost rocket engine engineer who was in the room with Musk a lot of times, to someone posting in ignorance on the Internet.
Is asking for invites to Epstein's island a good look? I don't think I'll take advice on decorum from you.
It's really sad you would take the word of paid-off ego glazers and insult your own intelligence by buying into the super-genius bullshit Elon wants you to.
The truth is pretty clear: he's just a sex fiend and likely pedophile who pays people to say nice things about him. It is clear as day that anyone not on his payroll has no love for him whatsoever.
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.
Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.
Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face.
I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.
We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.
But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.
I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.
Most people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket while the power is out...
It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
Paywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y
> According to the CDC, there have been no new smallpox cases since 1977.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...
I don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹
> The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
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That's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.
And it comes at a time when a disease we were working on eliminating, measles, has come back and the US is about to lose its measles-free status.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
We still have another chance for eradication in humans with Polio.
Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_fake_vaccination_campaign_...This should be a war crime...
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
If Bush was in Power, of course the accusation would have to made against Bush. So, of course, the accusation has to be made against the president that was in charge at the time. Dark skin color does not give him a "Get Out of Jail Free Card".
> Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power?
How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize? And what war crime? Was there a war? Maybe some special military operation against Bin Laden.
> How can you open a war crime case against a guy who already got a Peace Nobel Prize?
Henry Kissinger (1973 Nobel Peace Prize together with Lê Đức Thọ) can be considered a war criminal:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
Yasser Arafat (1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) was also very likely a war criminal.
Should’ve could’ve. If the grandma had a moustache she would be the grandpa.
I would accept it if it even if it was done by Ghandi.
It is approaches like that which gives some hope to the future. War crimes are indeed something which should never be allowed or overlooked. Being a political leader doesn't make people immune to criticism, but rather should be someone held to a higher expectation.
Who is Ghandi?
It's probably a mispelling of a French domain registrar known for its nonviolent resistance.
Are you kidding? A way to smear Obama and portray him as disrespectful to non-whites? The only reason it’s not on Fox is that it reminds Americans that we’ve only had one victory in the War on Terror and the Republican Party contributed nothing positive.
War crimes are "for Africa and thugs like Putin".
International law does not apply to the leaders of the western hegemony. It is merely a tool used to oppress poor nations even further.
This fact only further proves one thing: the CIA is a terrorist organization and the state behind it is responsible for some of the most disgusting things this planet has ever seen.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Evil shit
Why would this cause everyone in the area to not vaccinate, and not just limited to parents who are on a most-wanted list?
What made me disappointed about this was that they revealed how they did it, and they didn't rescue the doctor who helped them pull it off.
> The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in …
Sounds like RFK Jr…
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
I admire your optimism. I genuinely wish I could share it. I hope that you are right.
Russia is close to falling, which is the true source of many of the mental viruses that are destroying democracies. And now, Russia's biggest win, the US, is proving that instead of heading towards fascism, that the people will actually stand up and fight back. Six months ago, the outlook was far more uncertain and if the US had not resisted, or Trump had picked a softer target than Minnesotans (never invade a winter people in winter), I would probably be feeing far different.
Things in the US are going to get far worse from here, and there will be a political war, but at least there will be a political war against the fascism. A lower bound has been established for badness that at least allows saving democracy in the US. I have not been this hopeful since October 2024.
How does a public that derives its knowledge from authority (For example, how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun? Would they be able to reach those conclusions if school books taught something else?) stand a chance at resisting misinformation spread by trusted authorities?
> how do 99.999% of people know that the earth is flat and orbits the sun?
Pun intended?
Oops
Who is we, who will pay for it, and how will such informational inoculation benefit the rich?
The current media status quo, and its consequences does, which is why we get to enjoy it.
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
> you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful
if you are still alive.
Canada and the UK have a ton more measles than even the US's completely unacceptable level of measles.
Thinning this is a US problem completely misunderstands the nature of the misinformation problem.
And I hope there's vaccination requirements for travel, according to how public health officials determine threats.
Canada already lost their measles elimination status and had several times higher measles rate than the US.
At this point, anyone pushing anti-vaccine thinking as an American problem is just pushing anti-American bias. Vaccine misinformation and hesitancy is an almost worldwide problem.
People can simply have different perspectives on things. Measels has mortality rate of around 0.1% while small pox has a mortality rate of around 30%. So the individual risk from measels is relatively low leaving plenty of room for individual choice.
There's less room for the same argument with small pox. In fact small pox is where the term vaccine comes from - it was observed that milk maids weren't getting smallpox, which led to the discovery that infection with cow pox (which is relatively harmless) provided immunity to small pox - hence 'vacca cine', vacca = cow in latin.
But there's a long history of people trying to self vaccinate with all sorts of things against small pox including using scrapings off somebody's small pox wounds to hopefully give oneself a light infection. Needless to say that came with well understood side effects up to and including full-on small pox infection. But when the death rate is 30%, people were willing to do some crazy things, because the risk:reward was seen as worth it.
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FWIW I did ultimately decide to vaccinate my children against measels, but it was not an easy decision, because it is in general not that risky a disease whose mortality rate had already precipitously declined (from 13 per 100k to 0.19 per 100k) [1] before a vaccine was first introduced in 1963. Obviously I think it's the right decision, but I also wouldn't really fault anybody for going the other direction either.
[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death-r...
I think that if people observed what a 1 in 1,000 chance of a dead child looked like, they'd have a much easier time making the decision.
A friend's favorite Wiki page is on the micromort. [1] I found it kind of banal, but perhaps that's my more casual attitude towards death. I suspect the average person doesn't realize, or doesn't accept, how brief life truly is. One micromort is something with a 1 in a million chance of death. So with measels, we're talking about 1000 micromorts, if you're infected - which is also extremely unlikely. So if you give yourself a 1% chance of ever being infected with measels (which would be quite high) then not vaccinating would be down to a 1% * 1000 = 10 micromorts of risk.
All non-natural cause of death in the US, excluding suicide, is about 1.3 micromorts per day. So it's the same all non-natural cause risk you'll be exposed to over the next week. The page offers a lot of other comparables - traveling 100 miles by biking, 2500 by car, or 10k by airplane, and so on.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
In a world with a low vaccination rate, infection with measles is practically 100%. It spreads more easily than COVID.
You can take your risk with herd immunity if you want. That works well now, with a near universal vaccination rate. But if the rate drops below 90%, then you will get infected.
Immunity rate, not vaccination rate. This is why everybody ended up catching COVID, often multiple times, regardless of how much they injected themselves with. Whereas, measles, with an ostensibly higher spread rate, was already on its way out before vaccines were introduced with fewer than 1 new case per 500 people - far below even basic fertility rates. It's because infection with measles is a nice mixture of relatively low risk and providing lifetime immunity. Beyond that, herd immunity is a hand-wavy measurement about statistically preventing perpetual spread within a population, it says much less about individual susceptibility.
Your child being vaccinated against measles is 1. yes, protecting them, but 2. also protecting all the other children at school they interact with, and vice-versa. It isn’t just an individual choice. You should definitely fault people for going the other direction because they are willingly increasing the chance of your child or your child’s friends getting measles.
The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year. And these people are vectors for basically everything and are numerically very large. And you're inevitably going to bump into and interact with these people. So I think the idea of domestic herd immunity is increasingly nonsensical because 'domestic' is no longer even remotely close to a closed system. And global herd immunity is nonsensical simply because it's wholly unrealistic, and at that sort of scale any small issue can explode into a huge one: see - source of most modern cases of polio.
> The US sees in the ballpark of a hundred million tourists, business travelers, and migrants per year
American exceptionalism at its finest!
You do realise the vast majority of those "tourists, business travelers, and migrants" are all fully vaccinated?
Getting sick isn’t just life or death.
My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.
People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
I don't think this is a great argument. The reason is that Rubella/German measels is in the majority of cases very mild, in many - people will not even know they had caught it. If you take a large enough sample you'll absolutely find people winning a lottery that they really don't want to win, but the exact same logic is used to by people to avoid vaccinating. For instance the MMR vaccine can cause all sorts of nasty things in extreme cases, but in the average case it's believed to be mostly harmless. Though of course we're always discovering new things about medicines. There's even new side effects in e.g. tylenol still regularly being discovered and published about.
Food produced by Fritz Haber's Haber-Bosch process (making fertilizer) supports about half of the world's population.
He has quite a bit of chemical warfare weighing down his record.
He killed millions. He fed billions.
Epstein was friendly with, and made more people smile, than he raped.
Phil Spector produced music which meant a lot to a lot of people. Still a murderer.
Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands, yet should always be labelled a mass murderer because he knowingly positioned hundreds.
>Harold Shipman Saved the lives of thousands
Probably not though, I don't think a typical GP saves thousands of lives
Not alone, but as a team I bet he did. Just as Fritz Haber did not personally save countless millions with his discovery, thousands of other people had to be involved there as well.
Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-Bosch.
It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.
Please not that this was in relation to whether or not a general doctor saves lives… A lot of work is indirect.
The Haber–Bosch process was never a two‑man mission to “feed the world.” Haber devised a laboratory method to fix nitrogen, and Bosch led the first industrial‑scale implementation, but neither of them was personally producing, optimizing, transporting, and applying fertilizer across the globe. Turning that reaction into most of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer required teams of chemists, engineers, metalworkers, factory operators, agronomists, logistics workers, and farmers, and an entire century of industrial expansion. If it truly were a two‑person accomplishment, we would only need a handful of farmers per country, which is obviously not how agriculture or industry work.
There is no reason to believe that a lack of nitrogen was a problem in particular. It seems that most effort was spent on getting fertilizers with phosphorus and other minerals, nitrogen was secondary, as many plants can obtain it from the air. If anything, it allows our modern, heavily cereal skewed diet. Poor nutrition rarely meant an absolute lack of food, most of the time it only meant insufficuent quality, and the green revolution was a massive step backward in that regard
Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air. You are deeply misinformed on this subject.
> Plants cannot obtain nitrogen from the air
That is literally true, but for anyone who hasn't studied plant biology, I think that "some plants have evolved specific structures to host obligate symbiotic bacteria that obtain nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form usable by the plant" is close enough to "many plants can obtain [nitrogen] from the air".
(A link for anyone not familiar with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule)
I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.
Norman Borlaug probably comes close. H. Trendley Dean was also impactful on a large scale, while its seemingly less important it helps a lot of people.
I completely agree, but to be fair, there are some people who are politicians and helped to eradicate a disease [0] [1].
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/guinea-worm-disease-nearly-erad...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_dracunculiasis
Is there any way that people can work to re-introduce it into society? I know some folks are making a lot of progress with MMR.
Politicians and empire-builders (Elon) is currently standing in the way of human progress and history.
So creating cheap, reusable giant rockets is standing in the way of human progress? Being able to use neural links to restore sight to the blind is standing in the way?
I'm pretty sure that GP commenter was referring to the other stuff.
He shouldn't leave people guessing what he was referring to.
Maybe not, but one can always converse curiously and ask them what they meant. It's nicer to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
My replies ended in question marks.
You're really going to play the "just asking questions" card? You're smarter than this. Or should be.
You're doing the same thing you allege I did.
Oh really? If you, too, were being sarcastic, you have no business raising "my replies ended in question marks" as a defense, because you weren't actually asking a question, you were making a claim, and the question mark is purely decorative. That is also bad faith discussion. Which is really the core problem with the whole "just asking questions" thing, you start with ambiguous question marks, and retreat to whichever meaning is tactically expedient when challenged.
Meanwhile, I have no problem admitting that my question mark was decorative, and acknowledging my claim that you are engaging in bad faith discussion.
There was another group of people famous for building innovative rockets, but are otherwise not associated with human progress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
So it is about the big picture. (And about small pictures like that of Elon making a salut like the other group).
So yes, currently his rockets do not transport explosives. But that can change anytime and I expect it will very soon.
I thought American space flight etc was directly indebted to the people behind the V bombs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
The Saturn V was simply a scaled up V2. The critical components were all there:
1. boundary layer cooling
2. pre-heating fuel and cooling the nozzle by pushing the fuel through tubes in the nozzle
3. baffles to prevent pogo-ing
4. turbo fuel pumps
5. supersonic airframe
6. guidance system (although primitive)
The V2 was an ineffective military weapon that did little damage - because its guidance system was too primitive to be able to hit a target. Hitler also poured enormous resources into the V2 program, shifted away from producing weapons that were effective.
Elon rockets are only interesting because they can be reused.
What use is a reusable rocket with respect to explosives?
A car can be used to take people to the hospital, or it can be used to transport explosives.
They can bring explosives to space, loitering space ammunition.
Pretty easy. The only limits are your imagination and depravity. You launch the rocket, drop an orbital vehicle behind, and land. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
That vehicle could deorbit and drop a tungsten penetrator, smallpox, a nuclear device or any number of things.
All funded by a combination of government spending and defrauding the public via the Tesla Ponzi scheme.
Dropping a tungsten penetrator from orbit is an idea only science fiction can justify. In the real world the economics never close.
Huh?
In the real world we so far just managed to keep space free of military weapons not because they are expensive, but because of treaties. I just don't expect those to last much longer.
And frankly I never looked into the concept, but why do you think, a space base tungsten penetrator would be way more expensive, than a nuke on a missile?
The idea as proposed in various places is a very large multi-ton vehicle. He chose to focus on trivia. Pretty common for Elon fans.
Humans are pretty clever at devising ways to kill each other. The Russians put a garbage can of concrete on a ersatz ballistic missile on a terror strike against Ukraine. Like you said, these things don’t exist because of treaties.
Yes, I'm sure that starting the EV revolution, creating a satellite based internet network that covers the all planet and making space launches fully reusable and 10x cheaper is "standing in the way of human progress and history".
If you people could only hear yourselves talk...
Elon Musk is promoting progress only when he has something to gain from it (in economical terms or in terms of his image), but has no qualms wrecking progress, butchering indiscriminately and hurting prople when it comes to his personal grievances. This is further aggravated by his mercurial and egomaniacal personality, and the false reality build on conspiracies he surrounds himself in.
Hapazardly and chaotically dismantling the US public sector on some ideological crusade was not advancing human progress. Netiher was turning Twitter into some farcical shell of its former self, owned by Saudi Arabia. Neither was sabotaging projects such as high-speed rail systems purely out of spite.
> Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
Any good he has produced along the way (that mitigates the damage he is causing) is only a means to an end for him, and he would have no hesitations burning it all to the ground the moment it suites him. If everyone acted like him humanity would be doomed, not quickly progressing toward some technological utopia.
Or, as his acquaintance Sam Altman put it: "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it."
Haven't seen anything of your talking points make any reasonable impact in societal problems.
It's not what his businesses are doing, it is what he says and what he spreads to a tech bro disciple that spreads this shit far away, working with technologies like AI at the forefront, ending up setting us back in our progress & history.
Same applies to Thiel, Zuckerberg and whoever not. Read up on Thiel & Trump, then come back.
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Which LLM wrote this for you?
Well, unfortunately I still don’t have access to the hyper sophisticated god like AI that you, in your immense intellect, created, Michael. So I had to use a lesser one.
Of I did though, I’m sure my answer to your - extremely snarky and intelligent - remark world be a text that would stand in the shoulders of giants, together with Ulysses, The Divine Comedy and The Aeneid.
You could just restate your position, which is that you support pedophiles, rather than embarrassing yourself repeatedly with these replies.
Oh, no Michael, I’m sure, that in your infinite acumen, you know this and just want to spare us, lesser mortals, from the despairing truth. But I know the truth Michael, I know.
They are not just pedophiles, they are the pedophile lizard people Michael. Oh, the horror! The horror!
Pathetic.
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I must have forgotten that Elon actually is the original founder of Tesla and not a phony. At best he's their money guy.
Do you think Elon knows a single thing about rockets? Do you actually think he has literally anything to do with them? He isn't even capable of forming a sentence without stuttering, much less actually doing literally anything at all. Keep defending your pedophiles, bro. I'm sure in 10 years you'll be glad we have a written record of your stance.
Yes , he does. And making fun of people who stutter isn’t a good look.
I will take the word of the world’s foremost rocket engine engineer who was in the room with Musk a lot of times, to someone posting in ignorance on the Internet.
Is asking for invites to Epstein's island a good look? I don't think I'll take advice on decorum from you.
It's really sad you would take the word of paid-off ego glazers and insult your own intelligence by buying into the super-genius bullshit Elon wants you to.
The truth is pretty clear: he's just a sex fiend and likely pedophile who pays people to say nice things about him. It is clear as day that anyone not on his payroll has no love for him whatsoever.
These people have been a problem in the west for over a century. They are unintelligent people who spend their lives fighting what confuses them, and replacing it with something worse, that they can understand.
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You created an account to shill for a product?
Genghis Khan??
I thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did good, useful things.
No? That’s not at all obvious.
Genghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica
Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
I think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood.
Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome.
Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
Sometimes you have to do a lot of things that look very bad in order to do some greater good that overshadows all the bad you did.
Greatest, not most fucked
Just in time to roll over in his grave.
Smallpox is not measles! But, point taken.
And to see himself become the villain.
Yeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!
At least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face.
(https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
He did a great service to humanity
I'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...
It really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period.
The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000.
(There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
Actually, do we need to keep samples anymore?
mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab.
We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago.
We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway.
But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case.
I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus.
So yeah. Destroy the samples already.
Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore
This is tangential to your point, but smallpox vaccine protects against mpox (the virus formerly known as monkeypox) and the CDC still recommends it for people in certain mpox risk groups.
We don't vaccinate against smallpox, but keep in mind that at least two countries maintain live smallpox virus in government labs.
The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.
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Except it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.
If you don’t keep it then the first time you’ll get to study it will be when the first bodies are recovered from your cities.
Coincidentally, that would be the first time it would be urgent to study.
It would be a pretty shoddy bioweapon considering you can't really target it and vaccines are available.
Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so that it only affects America :-D
Most people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket while the power is out...
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It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
> AFAIK nobody kept copies
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
:(
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Funnily enough, RFK Jr. is doing what he can to bring its human cousin back:
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
Good thing that smallpox wasn’t eradicated due to a vaccine.
Vaccinia is very different from Smallpox. Or perhaps I misunderstand you?
That was sarcasm, right?
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> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
You're going to have to link that for me because I know the longtermism people are nuts about this, but their actual understanding is pretty poor.
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
I'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.