I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.
If Disney could throw concepts at their properties like Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Paw Patrol or any of their other CG shovel content (which my kid loves, of course) and have a new episode every day of the year, they would, and this lets them do that without employing the staff to make that happen. If all it took was a writer to put a pitch together and Sora to turn out an episode, that'd be a steal for $1B.
I think the little tears were fine, but my expectation of the weight of the cloth wasn't so much that it would start to rip on its own after a certain point. It felt more like a wet dough at a certain point than cloth.
Frame it as the safety of the vaccine, not the efficacy of it. If it was about efficacy, it would lead with the 25% lower risk because of COVID safety. But, these days, there are people who think vaccines are dangerous just because, so saying that taking the vaccine or not has equal mortality puts that to rest (or at least does for those who find science real).
The reduction in all-cause mortality was independent of covid deaths.
Which seems to suggest that there was big differences between the groups other than the vaccination.
This of course does not change that the vaccine seems mostly safe, but it definitely calls in to question whether the protection against covid death was vaccine-mediated or due to some other difference between the groups.
Therefore this paper is moderately strong evidence for the vaccine being safe, but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious.
The vaccinnated group was 1 year older on average, and had mode cardiovascular risk factors.
Covid has long term health consequences, and these are proportional to the severity of the acute infection.
People who died of a stroke of a heart infarction 6 months down the line were not counted as "covid death", even though covid is known to increase their incidence in the next year.
Another factor that may play a role: the people who chose not to take the vaccine may be prone to taking bad decisions more broadly, leading to a higher mortality rate.
Covid hospitalizations where half in the vaccinated group (as % of pop) than unvaccinated. That's extremely desirable when you're in a situation where you have do dedicate whole wings (and then some) of hospitals to a singular disease.
Sure, it's not a silver bullet but it's at least stainless steel.
There are other sources of evidence for efficacy. This paper is not a very strong source of evidence for efficacy due to some obvious uncontrolled difference between groups.
I wouldn't bother critiquing methodology without current, masters-level experience in the domain. I make incorrect assumptions when I'm even narrowly outside my own lane, and end up asking questions that clearly demonstrate e.g. my inability to parse fig. 4a.
I wouldn't bother commenting if I were hallucinating figures. There is no figure 4a.
If you look at figure 4 in the supplemental material you also see, per your expertise, that covid vaccine protects against traumatic injury. However even adjusting for the protective effect against traumatic injury there is still quite a large protective effect against all-cause mortality. So the beneficial effect of the vaccine is not solely caused by its protective effect against traumatic injury.
Or it could be, bold proposition I know, that there is a difference between the groups that both protects against traumatic injury and protects against all-cause mortality, independently of the vaccine.
OP's point was more 'How would you measure unvaccinated people that lived because vaccinated people weren't filling the ER, so there were beds/staff to spare'?
That unvaxed outcome would need to go in the 'vaxed lives saved' column somehow, or else it looks like 'outcomes were the same either way' because the lives saved from vaccination spill over into the non-vaxed group because the vaccine prevented the healthcare system from melting down.
I don’t think it’s possible to know anything conclusive about the safety for a few decades and a generation or two of affected kids can be observed. Given that finding harm would embarrass important aristocrats, I don’t think that evidence would ever be found in the foreseeable future. That mRNA and lipid nano particles were never found to be safe until the exact moment of crisis is awfully convenient for its investors.
I say decades because of the study below. Certainly, the authors could have published it for engagement bait or malice or some reason.
I interpret this as the comment saying "we won't know how this affected things until decades from now." Which can likely be attributed to existing vaccine skepticism and is unlikely to result in them changing their opinion in the next ever.
What I think a lot of people who are anti-vax miss is the risk of the vaccine compared to the risk of COVID. They feel like they're being asked something risky in a vacuum, when in fact, they're being asked for something with (as best as we can tell) limited risk against a backdrop of a dangerous virus that killed millions and caused a global pandemic.
Even if they could demonstrably prove the vaccine created a higher risk of outcomes for people who took it, the risk compared to getting COVID is de minimus, and the likelihood of getting COVID is high. I would be surprised if there was a significant population of people who had avoided it at this point.
You really aren’t going to know how this MRNA in egg and sperm cells are going to affect offspring until you have offspring to observe. Effects like wolbachia could take multiple generations to observe.
mRNA can't cause wolbachia. Wolbachia is a bacterium that actually lives inside cells and gets transmitted through eggs to offspring. it's a persistent organism that reproduces. There's not a way for mRNA to grow bacteria.
mRNA is just a molecule that breaks down, and the mRNA in these vaccines is extremely fragile and temporary. Once injected it enters whatever cells are nearby (muscle cells)and ribosomes read it to produce the inert spike protein. The mRNA itself is gone within hours. Your cells have enzymes specifically designed to break down RNA because cells naturally produce and dispose of mRNA constantly as part of normal function.
The mRNA in vaccines never enters the cell nucleus where DNA is stored, so it can't integrate into your genome or affect reproductive cells in that way. And it doesn't replicate itself either.
And millions of babies have been born to vaccinated parents by now. If the effects you are talking about were even possible they would definitely have shown up by now.
I’m not suggesting comirnanty is wolbachia. If there is reproductive harm, or reproductive harm passed on to children, then we will not know for a long time.
I believe that you’re well read on the CDC’s messaging on this topic. I’d like to bring to your attention that glyphosate was scientifically shown to pose no harm, but that key paper was retracted 25 years later. Pfizer is making over $10B/yr on comirnanty and at one point it was over $50B. Would you lie for that kind of money? Could you imagine someone who would?
Yes, but imagine how much money hospitals can make if they can convince idiots to skip affordable preventable medicine and instead pay tens of thousands for hospital stays.
Hospitals were paid much more for the Covid patients that died than those who lived. There’s some very strong circumstantial evidence about this driving treatment protocols.
I too despise the existence of a profit motive in public health, the sane (not perfect) alternative is to nationalize medicine, not to ban it because the profit motive makes it suspect.
I'd like to bring to your attention that many people on the internet have made claims which were later retracted, thus your comment is unreliable.
Obviously there are confounding variables besides vaccination status, but I find it pretty compelling that the decrease in COVID mortality among the vaccinated group was significantly larger than the decrease in all-cause mortality of that group. This suggests whatever the difference was between the two groups, besides vaccination, either had a much larger impact on COVID than other causes of death or that the vaccine had some positive impact.
One example of the former explanation I could imagine is that people who got vaccinated against COVID were probably also more likely to take other preventative measures, like wearing a mask or avoiding larger crowds of people. Those precautions would be more likely to be effective against a contagious disease like COVID but less likely to protect them against some other causes of death like heart disease.
I'm not sure how likely I find that as an explanation compared to the alternative that the vaccines provide at least some level of protection. My observation was that widespread measures specifically meant to defend against COVID, like masking and social distancing, largely went away well before the end of the time period covered by this study, at least in the US.
Amusingly, I suspect the anti-vax contingent would likely be bothered by data suggesting anything the COVID vaccinated group was doing differently protected against COVID, since their position seems to largely be that not only is the COVID vaccine useless, but so are any other measures meant to reduce the spread.
> but quite weak evidence for the vaccine being efficacious
That’s directly contradicted by the results of the study. E.g.,
“Vaccinated individuals had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 (weighted hazard ratio [wHR], 0.26 [95% CI, 0.22-0.30]) and a 25% lower risk of all-cause mortality (wHR, 0.75 [95% CI, 0.75-0.76])…”
It’s pretty clear a lot of unvaccinated people who died of covid would be alive today had they gotten vaccinated.
(I would point out the current yearly vaccine they are putting out is potentially a different story since covid is changing and so is the vaccine. I’d talk to my dr about whether to get that or not.)
The simple explanation is that the causal agent for the excees of the non-covid deaths is the same SARS-CoV2 virus, but death comes later and not at the acute phase of the disease.
There was a study that showed that cancer patients who receive a MRNA COVID vaccine live longer. This could also be for extrinsic reasons, but IIRC the study considered the reason to be a pronounced immune response that also attacked cancer cells.
So there's a chance that the vaccine provokes a general immune response that's protective against a number of mortality-causing issues.
A 25% reduction is huge, even if you account for the fact that people who get vaccines tend to be more health conscious to begin with, when you consider that outside of the very sick and very old Covid has a mortality rate under 1%.
I like to ask people who talk about a 1% mortality rate if they'd go to a football game in a stadium with 100k seats if 1k of those seats randomly had a small bomb attached.
I hate it when blanket statements like this creep in.
Which Covid? The initial version was definitely more deadly than later versions.
What about future covids? Are you willing to guarantee every version of covid from here on out will be less deadly? It is the general case to be true, but it is not some sort of law.
Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.
The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.
Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.
Where do you see them using "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID" in the beginning? I skimmed over all uses of the term before the "Results" chapter, none of them seem to exclude COVID deaths?
I've felt similarly recently, and I think those days are fleeting if not gone. Ford recently talked about replatforming their entire range, which would include basic trucks at more reasonable prices, but there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be, and they're gone in favor of the luxury ones with small beds. It is annoying. There is an interesting startup that I can't remember the name of that touts an 8 foot bed (which is great) in the chassis footprint of a Mini Cooper. I don't think I saw pricing, but I would snatch one of those up.
> there's not really a market for work trucks in the way there used to be
I find this to be a strange assertion. I’ve only asked a small number of contractors, but every one I’ve asked wished they could buy a smaller, lower, practical work truck with decent capacity.
There's no market for new small work trucks because nobody is willing to sell them. Not because nobody is willing to buy them.
People who need work trucks end up getting f-150 or similar, work vans, or buying used. There was a used car lot in my old neighborhood that specialized in work trucks. It would be 75% white single cab trucks, 20% white panel vans, and then 5% work trucks and vans in colors.
Well CAFE standards say don't bother making small vehicles. And manufacturers say oh darn, we have to make the vehicles with lots of profits? Well sorry small truck buyers, we're out.
If there was a market for those vehicles, they'd exist. The folks you asked either didn't buy them when they had the chance or don't make up enough of the market to justify the truck.
> I’ve only asked a small number of contractors, but every one I’ve asked wished they could buy a smaller, lower, practical work truck with decent capacity
And if you ask Reddit, everyone says they want to buy a brown NA station wagon with a manual... yet nobody actually buys those cars when dealers stock them. This is what economists call "stated" vs. "revealed" preference.
Nissan discontinued the last small long bed, small-cab compact pickup last year. Now you can only get it as a two row. They had a monopoly on this supposedly lucrative market segment that contractors claim to want... yet it was discontinued because nobody was actually purchasing that configuration.
Even for full-size pickups, GM revealed less than 10% of the product mix is single-row long bed.
It's not some conspiracy. People. Aren't. Buying. Them.
You might consider acquiring a used model that meets your needs, then spend $ to zero-time the important stuff. In 2023, I decided not to buy a new car, but to re-engine (and other stuff) my 1999 4Runner. Really happy I did.
I would like a pickup (spouse -> serious gardener), have decided to get something simple & used, then put another $20K into it.
You can have that today. If you get a USB-C breakout for the dock, it'll treat the Moonlander, or any keyboard, like a normal keyboard. You can not destroy your wrists right now, as I sometimes choose to do.
I’m pretty sure they are saying they want both that keyboard plugged in and MacOS rather than the limited iPadOS; not that they think MacOS is required to be able to plug a keyboard in.
I had one, too, and in hindsight I regret what an ass I was to the poor substitute teachers who had one job to do for the day and couldn't because I thought it was funny to turn the TV off when they bend down to turn on the VCR.
I also had the one that could do IR messages with other watches, and that was a lot less disruptive and still pretty fun.
There's one data point. I would bet, though, that Apple, Sony and Samsung have plenty more data points of devices that didn't move and thus they stop making smaller devices.
Yup, keep in mind the generally Western audience on HN is only a small minority of the total market, which is... hundreds of millions of people for the iphone alone.
This is the correct answer. I don't think anyone believes that Apple doesn't manufacture smaller phones out of spite? They are just not popular enough.
That must be why all those vacuum robots and smart TVs phone home to China. Because people really love appliances that spy on them. Good thing Samsung patched their fridges to add advertisements and spyware, because that's what their customers (in the US) were really waiting for.
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
It's clear at this point that terminal apps have lost to GUIs, but cURL is the one place where I think that's a shame. cURL /always just works/. It is predictable, consistent, transparent, and pretty easy to use in its simple forms, but with plenty of room for complexity if you wish to go the far. There's a reason libcurl is in everything from automobile infotainment systems to toasters. I'm glad to use a GUI over libcurl that doesn't also need a cloud to work, but at the end of the day, I find myself piping cURL to jq more than almost anything else.
Way back when Postman was but a mere Chrome plugin, I spent a lot longer than I'd have liked fighting with a request that should have been logging GET requests but wasn't. Imagine my surprise when I found that it was following Chrome's caching rules and not actually making my requests despite me intentionally firing off those requests. If only I had just used cURL...
reply