> The DIY community and industry are not in opposition, says Lewis.
I would really like to believe that, but given how Medtronic and every CGM I have used have seemingly intentionally sabotaged open source loop compatibility with every new product, it doesn't seem like everyone's on board...
Yeah she's being diplomatic for sure. Dexcom plays ball and is also the most successful of the CGMs, so you would think that others would follow their lead and write their data to apple health. Most companies keep their data thinking its going lead to some unspecified profits down the line but then never really do anything with it.
I have an AndroidAPS. This is how it works. If the phone loses contact for any reason the device just falls back to delivering insulin at a fixed rate as normal.
> put a spotlight on the big pharmaceutical companies that had brought them to market — especially Pfizer and Moderna
Moderna? The research startup that had only recently IPO'd and didn't have a single commercial product before covid? Seems weird to call it a "big pharmaceutical company".
I'd rather a few founders become billionaires from a successful startup than have Moderna gone bankrupt and lose the vaccines they were developing forever.
This assumes that only pharma companies can execute the steps required to bring the fruits of all that research to market. There is no reason a govt entity can’t do the same. It is a question of setting up the right incentives for the employees of that govt entity.
Yes it’s a matter of the incentives, but a government entity has fundamentally different incentives than a private entity. Countries ranging from Canada to Sweden to India to China invested heavily into state-owned industries in the 20th century, and every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.
> every single one reversed course. Because it just didn’t work.
Didn't work for whom?
To suggest that political changes happen due to "it didn't work" seems like a pretty shallow conclusion. There are a lot that can be said about the last decades of free-market privatization & reforms in Europe, and in Sweden in particular, but that it was done out of necessity rather than a general political shift after the collapse of the Soviet Union is simply a biased take.
Everyone from voting public in liberal democracies (Sweden, Canada, Germany), to the voting public in less liberal democracies (India), the Islamic world (Egypt), to communist regimes (China, Vietnam).
So "heavy investment in state-owned industries just doesn't work" is actually just you drawing far-reaching conclusions over shifting economic policies and/or voting patterns. That line of reasoning doesn't even pass the most basic correlation is not causation test.
When many different societies with different political systems all try something around the same time, and all retreat from that approach a few decades later, that’s really significant real-world data. The country I’m from has socialism written into its constitution, but now is strongly neoliberal. Maybe that’s just correlation, but otherwise it has little in common with Sweden, reducing the possibility that some common third factor is in play.
I mean, discussions about this free-market/neoliberal political shift have been going on for a long time. To just assume state-owned industry "just doesn't work" because of that post-Soviet shift is confirmation bias on an already weak correlation.
In Sweden it's glaringly obvious that the privatizations have provided worse outcomes than before - even the free-market think-tanks are smart to avoid that subject. Unfortunately for us, they instead tend to focus on supporting voices that blame immigration for the consequences of sky-rocketing inequality. I guess they'll have to wait another decade or so before the myth building of the inherently incompetent state is on more fertile ground.
The shift towards SOEs and back away is close to the largest scale economic experiment we have ever done on the planet. Many of these countries, particularly India and China, invested heavily in terms of political and reputational capital into the approach of a government-run economy. They had tremendous incentives to stick with a system they had assured the public was the way of the future. When the same approach is tried in everything from Scandinavian social democracies to Islamic socialist societies to Asian communist regimes, and then all of them change course after a few decades, that’s not just “confirmation bias. That’s data.
Maybe voters in Sweden and voters in India and party functionaries in China all just got some “right wing”virus at the same time. Or maybe they were reaction to the unworkability of an economic system they had tried. You know what they say: those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it.
It's hard for me to take doubling down on "correlation is causation" seriously, especially on such an obviously multi-faceted subject, it's simply too unnuanced. Just the assertion in passing that China has supposedly moved away from SOEs could be a debate on its own.
You talk about incentives? The amount of money that has been concentrated to the wealthiest portions of society is simply staggering, even in superficially equal countries like Sweden. The privatization of state-owned industry, properties, and the welfare system has been an unprecedented goldmine for private interests. Essentially a smaller Scandinavian version of a post-USSR wealth transfer. The incentives for people in power in less democratic and/or corrupt countries is even more obvious.
The virus was the global shock-wave due to the collapse of soviet-Union? Come on. It was not like the shift to third-way social-democracy was a grassroots movement. Party politics is more fluid than voting patterns. A sentiment of "It's new times now, we need to go along with the flow" (not that dissimilar to today's politicians accepting the gig-economy, but that's another topic), rather than "we can clearly see that state-owned industry just isn't working, we have no choice but to try something new". If it actually was the latter, it would've be repeated by right-wing representatives on every political debate since the 1990, but that hasn't happened.
I'll leave it there, I think I've gotten my point across.
Sweden's state-owned enterprises were sold purely because of politics. No one reversed course. It's just the right wing got majority and sold what they could when they had the chance including a large amount of public housing, schools and healthcare facilities.
No, it wasn’t some accident of Swedish politics. The same thing happened all over the world at the same time. It happened in India, it happened in China. It happened in Germany. The movement toward state owned enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s was reversed in myriad countries with myriad political systems because it didn’t work.
I didn't say anything about the rest of the world. You made a statement about Sweden, even highlighting that it was "every single country" which, unless you want to qualify that statement, simply wasn't accurate. State-owned enterprises in Sweden weren't sold off because they didn't provide service or even didn't make profits but because of shifting politics in Sweden and the EU. Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power and the EU made many ventures outright illegal as unlawful state aid. The same politicians who privatized everything else and ended conscription so Sweden had no choice but to join Nato. You can of course argue that "it didn't work because it wasn't wanted" but then the same thing goes for anything else that was changed like government owned nuclear power plants. Which these days of course also requires approval from the EU.
> Politicians who never wanted state-owned enterprises came into power
And pray tell, how did that happen? How do people come into power in Sweden? I thought that it has a system where people propose what they will do, and the population votes on whose ideas and proposals they like the most, doesn't it?
What happened in other countries is relevant because it shows that it wasn’t just something you can explain away as specific to Swedish politics and who got elected when.
Medical professionals worry a lot about "compliance". It would not be unusual for a doctor to unironically believe that "leverage" like this—forcing the patient to come in for a check-up instead of letting them make their own decisions—actually benefits the patient. So it's not necessarily about money, but that's not imo saying it's much better.
Yes, that's a pretty obvious confounding possibility. It's foolish to draw any causal conclusions from a correlation between 'wealth' and 'choice mindset' when the causality could clearly go either way.
Providing up-front funding for crazy ideas like electric cars and reusable rockets when everyone else is too stupid and shortsighted to is itself productive activity. In fact it is the most important productive activity: figuring out what to do, what is a good idea, and being willing to bet the returns of your previous labour on it and wait.
The return on investment is the payment it is in our self-interest to give for this activity, because we want and need such work to be done (so that we can make use of the fruits of such ventures, instead of getting nothing at all when wealth is squandered on bad ideas or just plain old consumption).
But how do we know who will come up with good ideas about what to do? Why Musk? Because he managed to earn a lot through PayPal? Does that business skill (and luck) carry over to decisions about rockets and populating Mars and developing AI?
Why not give a billion to a random business owner to come up with what to do?
Why Musk what? The point is that it's not about Musk. We're talking about whether Musk "deserves" his billions in profit and the answer is it's not about Musk, and it's not about "deserve". It's about all the people who benefit because of the existence of spacex/tesla/etc, who wouldn't benefit if we refuse to pay for the work of intelligent investment (by, say, seizing profits), because that would prevent their existence in the first place.
Certainly, if you think you can identify people who are particularly qualified to pick good ideas and make investments in them, it's not a bad idea to give them some money (but where do you get that money? hopefully not somewhere with negative externalities such as stealing it from different random business owners). Although structurally it's better if the billion itself is given as an investment instead of a gift, because then the person giving the billion has "skin in the game" themselves. Which is basically what I think VCs do, although I don't know how effective they usually are.
(Yes, this whole thing assumes a regulatory framework where businesses that have negative externalities or are otherwise bad for the world do not make profit. Indeed, companies that use dark patterns or rent seeking tactics to make profit should be legally punished, and if such punishments make them bad investments it's a good thing, because it means they were on net bad for the world.)
> It's about all the people who benefit because of the existence of spacex/tesla/etc
No one benefits by the mere "existence" of SpaceX/Tesla. People benefit only from what those companies produce, and the things those companies produce only come into this world by way of people selling their labor to design, engineer, and manufacture the rockets/cars. We can go all the way down the supply chain and say that people only benefit from Tesla due to the people mining lithium in other countries. And yet the CEO of Tesla believes that the people mining his lithium deserve to have their government replaced by a US-backed coup to be more friendly to his corporation.
The point isn't that we should "seize profits". The point is that the guy at the top isn't producing as much value as he thinks he is compared to everyone below him. They are producing the real value, they should be getting the wealth. Maybe Musk still comes out of the equation the richest one of them all. Fine. But he doesn't have to come out a demi-god with more money than he could spend in 100 lifetimes. There's no reason that needs to happen.
It's interesting how spot-on Coinbase's 'prebuttal' was (https://blog.coinbase.com/upcoming-story-about-coinbase-2012...). There's very little in the NYT article that isn't mentioned. The only point of inaccuracy seems to be that the story was published on Friday morning, the day right after the prebuttal, not Sunday as originally suggested. Maybe the prebuttal forced NYT's hand?
It's spot-on because the NYT told them ahead of time about the claims they were going to make, in the process of fact-checking those claims and offering Coinbase an opportunity to provide quotes to rebut them in the article, which opportunity Coinbase availed itself of.
> One Black employee said her manager suggested in front of colleagues that she was dealing drugs and carrying a gun, trading on racist stereotypes. Another said a co-worker at a recruiting meeting broadly described Black employees as less capable. Still another said managers spoke down to her and her Black colleagues, adding that they were passed over for promotions in favor of less experienced white employees. The accumulation of incidents, they said, led to the wave of departures.
It's an online algorithm. It's meant to be used on essentially infinite streams of data, such as a live dashboard of latencies of a running server. In that context, providing a 5 element, or any finite list as an example seems like a non sequitur.
Your examples do relate to problems the algorithm actually has in this application, but they manifest as things like "extremely large warmup time" and "adjusting to a regime change in the distribution taking time proportional to the change". For instance if your data is [1000, 1001, 1000, 1001...] then it takes 1000 steps to converge, which may be longer than the user has patience for.
However, the algorithm does always converge eventually, as long as the stream is not something pathological like an infinite sequence of consecutive numbers (for which the median is undefined anyhow).
Parent said "influence desired career paths", which is not the same as differences in performance. People choose a career path for many reasons besides ability, such as individual personality, ability in alternative jobs (note the quote in your first link which points out that "girls outperform their male counterparts on achievement tests in stereotypically feminine subject areas"), or even their experience being bullied in high school with regard to the job.
Furthermore, if you want to come to valid statistical conclusions about whether a discrepancy is due to a particular cause (and can't just do a RCT), it's not enough to just ignore plausible confounders until they are "provable". You need to systematically control for all possible confounders.
I would really like to believe that, but given how Medtronic and every CGM I have used have seemingly intentionally sabotaged open source loop compatibility with every new product, it doesn't seem like everyone's on board...