I was in SF in the 90s this kind of talk is nonsense. Crime was far higher in SF back then, area near the stadium was a no-go area, there were open gang wars in SF on TV. Hell, go watch the Michael Douglas TV show “The Streets of SF” from the 70s80s
Crime is down, mic of the city is gentrified and the total number of homeless in CA and SF is roughly in the same range it’s been since Reagan was governor.
A lot of this BS about CA and how bad things are seems to be from people who haven’t been here long or people overdosing on right wing media which has
Non-stop been attacking CA for 30 years nightly, all the while it has continued to become more and more dominant economically.
As someone who's fairly new to this city, this is enlightening to read, as I always thought the homelessness was only a recent product of displacement due to increased cost-of-living
I’ve been in San Francisco since 1992, and this is the worst it’s ever been.
The current attitude seems to be that everything is fine and nothing needs fixing. Then people are shocked when Trump wins (and let’s be honest, Trump is not exactly a great person).
Because it is an externality. Capitalism works when there are property rights. Even educated libertarians admit that that which is not able to be given property rights must be subject to government oversight.
Public safety is an externality. The air and water are externalities.
Private industry can't effectively compete to optimize a cost which is not "priced in". That's the whole point. If you can pollute, damage public safety, et al, it amounts to a free subsidy, you are externalizing costs which should show up in your balance sheet.
It's like people read Ayn Rand, or some cliff notes version of free market capitalism, but don't read any of the deep philosophical economic arguments in the literature, and then parrot slogans around.
Nothing to do with energy star. Modern Bosch Dishwashers use less water, wash better, and dry better, than your old 1990s washers.
In the same way that people think low-flow toilets are why their sh1t doesn't flush, instead of the proliferation of multi-ply super-thick toilet paper that are almost as bad as paper towels. It doesn't matter how much flow you have, if you flush a wad of cellulose that won't instantly dissolve like single-ply or thin-two-ply, you'll need to break out the augur.
And really, if you don't have a Toto Washlet or Japanese toilet, you're missing out. You barely need any toilet paper at all, and don't walk around with fecal particles wiped against your skin all day.
Those are applied-ML level advancements, OpenAI has pushed model level advancements. xAI has never really done much it seemed except download the latest papers and reproduce them.
Don't forget that OpenAI was also following Anthropic's lead at the model level with o1. They may have been first with single-shot CoT and native tokens, but advancements from the product side matter, and OpenAI has not been as original there some would like to believe.
The issue isn't just Musk's clearances, it's the clearances of the employees he's giving access to. With stuff like Salt Typhoon out there, and reports of Musk's college age hackers hooking arbitrary hard disks up to government computers, can you imagine the potential for potential Russian or Chinese infiltration given how careless Musk has shown his management to have been in the past?
Remember how Israel destroyed Iranian centrifuges with a worm on a USB stick that they just waited for someone to be dumb enough to plug into a government connected intranet?
C'mon man, the people defending Musk's brazen behavior here really need to think long and hard about what they're justifying because the like the guy's cars or rockets, or MAGA politics. This is CRAZY.
If you can find one, I’d like to see a news story showing that the people accessing the data don’t have the proper security clearances to. It seems most people are getting swept up in media narratives rather than the reported facts.
What do you consider a proper security clearance? One emergency approved by the President on a whim, or one that is the result of careful vetting over a 6 month process which seems to be the standard for renewals or new clearances? One of them is 19 years old, the other 5 are 24 and younger. You want 6 kids in charge of a 6 trillion dollar system, and one of them with hedge fund connections? Yeah, nothing that could go wrong there.
And what was so urgent about axing USAID that required this weird process of bypassing all of the normal ways people audit a six trillion dollar payment system? Seriously, what was the hurry?
You don’t think they’re being sloppy and reckless? We literally have critical websites going off line, we have airports like San Carlos losing all their ATCs, we have republicans in Congress confused whe their own constituents lose access to services because of misworded EOs, this is not normal.
We couldn’t have had a report prepared over six months, have Musk go to Congress and testify and show all the waste, and a plan to prioritize the cuts, have an orderly wind down, etc?
The US government isn’t X where you fly in in the middle of the night and are so incompetent you start randomly unplugging servers and have to be frantically rescued by heroic sysadmins.
This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.
Property security clearance is one that is legally given, regardless of circumstance. The idea of having laws doesn't involve picking and choosing what's considered proper. There's also no "emergency approved" security clearances happening here. In addition to that, Katie Wells has already posted that "No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances."
The strategy for this administration is to do as much as possible as quickly as possible because they know they'll be challenged and they only have 4 years. The Medicaid site was up the very same day (01/28/25) with no payments missed. And the previous contracting company for San Antonio has been given an extension. Nothing they're doing has been shown to be illegal and what you're describing are pretty minor blips considering the changes they're making.
> This is the people’s property, not his. We have three branches of government, due process, checks and balances, we don’t have a dictatorship and frankly everyday this is looking more and more like a soft coup.
Yes, it’s the people’s property, being granted to private third parties by the executive branch under block grants from Congress. And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this. This is the elected leader of the executive branch delegating authority to his agent to regulate performing discretionary functions of the executive branch. That’s responsive government, not dictatorship.
We just had an election where both parties ran on an anti-immigration platform, and the more extreme guy won. If that didn’t result in canceling discretionary grants to refugee resettlement programs that would have meant democracy doesn’t work.
Demanding that someone write a report and have some committee is absurd. You can never change an organization that way. What you’re really demanding is that unelected civil servants be allowed to prioritize what they want instead of what the voters want.
I encourage you to listen to this NYT podcast about immigration: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... It details how for decades immigration policy has departed from what Congress actually enacted and what voters wanted. A lot of that was due to state department just doing whatever it wanted—e.g. turning the H1B from a temporary worker program into a vehicle for permanent immigration. That’s a profound failure of democracy.
> And the people elected Trump as the President in part based on his promise to scrutinize how unelected civil servants were managing all this.
By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant? Having a guy who registered as a foreign agent of Turkey (Flynn) tweeting out details in a manner that could put people under threat? What line is there that they would cross that would concern you? If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you? Keep in mind in this discussion there is precisely one party that’s been threatened with death by Muslims and it’s not you.
> By having a bunch of unelected non civil servants run rampant?
This is where you’re going off the rails. Civil servant is a constitutionally meaningless label. There’s the President, Principal and Inferior Officers, then employees and volunteers with ministerial authority. Civil servant isn’t a special category. It’s not a constitutionally recognized authority that somehow must be protected from the President and his agents.
And to be clear I don’t dislike civil servants. I worked with great civil servants at FCC. But their job is to do what the elected President and confirmed appointees say. There’s great civil servants, and there’s crappy ones. A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.
> What line is there that they would cross that would concern you?
The only “line” that’s been crossed is an imaginary one between different categories of unelected employees whose authority derives entirely from the elected president and senate confirmed political appointees.
> If they ordered Muslims to swear loyalty oaths or leave that would be fine with you?
Elon is the good guy. He tweeted about NED, which I didn’t know about. Their web page crows about helping to overthrow democracy the government in Bangladesh. When I told my dad about it—who has been a USAID contractor his whole career—he was like “yeah, NED is a CIA front.” He also pointed out that USAID under Samantha Powers has become enormously political and has been turned into a vehicle for destabilizing foreign governments. I hate that’s true—our thanksgivings are literally a USAID reunion. But it’s not surprising that the state department has been using the goodwill of an agency that builds hospitals in Bangladesh to export their crazy ideas around the world.
Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire. I grew up listening to complaints about the state department meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. And this is the first chance I’ve seen in my lifetime to fix that.
I do agree about NED (what did they do in BD?) My parents voted for Trump. To say the least this is causing friction. I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.
> A genius from SpaceX is probably substantially smarter and more diligent than the average.
This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance. I went to school with a lot of geniuses, people certainly smarter than your SpaceX employees. I don’t know that then or now I would give them untrammeled run of the government.
> Muslims should be supporting what Trump and Elon are doing. This is the first break in the bipartisan consensus in favor of American Empire.
I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.
> My parents voted for Trump. To say the least this is causing friction.
So did my mom! Elon pushed her over the finish line.
> I have a little trouble believing people like Mike Flynn have their safety and best interests in mind.
I agree. But I think well-intentioned but ignorant moralists are even more dangerous. I’m shocked at how quickly the anti-imperialist left has flipped when State/the CIA put up some rainbow flags.
> This hardly strikes me as a democratic sentiment or one that has anything to do with Constitutional governance.
It’s orthogonal to constitutional governance. If someone isn’t politically accountable (either elected or a political appointee) then I’d rather they be competent than simply long-tenured.
> I seem to remember an anecdote from partition of Bengal about a goat getting its head stuck in a pot and the village headman’s preferred solution being to decapitate the goat.
Usually drug use, financial debt to foreigners, or any criminal violations can get you rejected for clearance, especially top secret, so the only way he has this clearance is because the executive branch overrode it.
You’re forgetting about 2 decades of US DoE funding of EUV research through EUV-LLC which ASML joined late. A lot of the early groundwork and foundational research was done by DoE including using US built synchrotron accelerators to try out various early approaches.
Seems to me that what Andreessen was really mad about was the CFPB forcing his portfolio companies that committed consumer fraud to return money to their customers. He also lied about the CFPB doing debanking, they don’t have that power.
While debanking may be a problem, there’s a false populism in these disingenuous VCs, pretending that their troubles are the same as everyone else. These guys want to operate in grey areas that enable laundering, illegal gambling, buying/selling contraband, and straight up rug pulls, and not be subject to any risk or oversight.
No, he’s pretty much against them and makes a new excuse each time. He would claim that no vaccine ever has gone through enough testing.
He also denied HIV causes AIDS, days it’s Poppers or lifestyle.
He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.
He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.
The guy latches on to whatever statistical outlier study he can find like an ambulance chasing lawyer and is a threat to public health that has been massively improved over the last century.
All of his attacks on dyes and seed oils won’t move the needle when the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.
> He also pushed ivermectin which studies show has no statistically significant effect on COVID.
Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.
There will be people who have both COVID and parasites. If you give them Ivermectin around the time they catch COVID, they will get better outcomes. Statistics will pick that up, it is a real effect. AND it has real world policy implications, there are a lot of people in the world who should immediately be given Ivermectin if they catch COVID (or, indeed, any disease). The more important political issue was when people noticed that (very real) effect without understanding the cause they were attacked rather than someone explaining what was happening.
It is a good case study of evidence being misleading, but the statistical significance of that evidence is indisputable. Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered - it is there. In fact as a baseline it turns out we would expect any effective drug will have a statistically significant positive effect on COVID outcomes.
> Studies showed that it had a statistically significant effect on COVID. The problem is that with hindsight it is obvious any sufficiently powerful study will show it has a statistically significant effect so the existence of that effect isn't particularly interesting evidence.
Preliminary studies with small n showed a statistically significant effect. Follow up studies with larger n showed no such effect. Meta studies also concluded no effect.
> Any study that doesn't find that effect is just underpowered
I'm sorry, but no, in fact the opposite is true. The underpowered studies are the only ones showing an effect. [1].
What has happened with Ivermectin is the "anchoring effect". [2] Early studies showed promise which has caused people to think there is promise there. After that, grifters and conspiracy peddlers started out publishing the actual research on the benefits.
If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy. That is a pretty extreme claim, to the point where 1 study (or review, in this case) isn't really an argument. It is much more likely that that they just aren't picking up the statistical signal that is obviously going to be there somewhere.
There isn't a shortage of studies showing an ivermectin-COVID relationship. https://c19ivm.org/meta.html makes for interesting reading, although it is quite misleading because it is probably measuring parasite prevalence rather than anything new.
> If you believe that, it implies you believe someone infested with parasites expects the same COVID outcomes as someone who is mostly healthy.
No, it doesn't.
The crux of your argument is that there is an invisible parasitic pandemic which is, frankly, absurd. Parasites by their nature are far less transmissible than an airborn virus is. They are primarily regionally locked and locked out of most developed countries. The US, for example, does not have a major internal parasite problem because public waters are treated against most parasites and filtered before general consumption.
As for the site, it's got a lot of pretty numbers that are like "Yeah look, 100% this ivermectin is great!" which is pretty fishy. You would not expect to see something like that. But, scroll to the bottom and all the sudden you see why that is, they purposefully find reasons to omit all studies that counter that claim.
Like, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to trust a website that is pushing for vitamin D supplements to treat covid. It's not a serious website and it has a very clear agenda.
Yourself (cogman10) and roenxi might both be in furious agreement from my PoV.
There are no good studies showing a useful relationship between ivermectin and COVID outcomes in low parasite G20 countries ( UK, AU, US, etc ).
The early studies most quoted had high N, good procedures, and showed ivermectin having a very positive effect across the board wrt many diseases ( flu, COVID, etc. ). These studies were in countries and regions with high parasite prevelance and demonstrated pretty conclusively that people with no worms were healthier, had better functioning immune systems, and both resisted and recovered from infections noticably better than untreated populations with parasites.
The supplement pushing website is being disingenous and obfuscating the context of the studies quoted in order to flog crap to rubes.
Fun read; I knew of the "good studies" that Scott ended up with, I'd never bothered to look much at the site in question as it screamed (to myself at least) of marketing driven bias .. and lo and behold many of the quoted papers are low N, sketchy, or outright fraudulent.
I suspect the best most concise summary is simply "If you have or even suspect you have worms, take ivermectin. Your general health and well being will most probably improve".
Alright, lets go through this slowly. Run me through the point which you think is unreasonable:
1. We do a study. Some % of the participants have parasites, in line with the base rate for the area.
2. Split the group into experiment and control. The experiment group gets Ivermectin.
3. Wait until everyone gets COVID. The people with parasites in the control group get terrible outcomes because their immune system is way overloaded, but the people who used to have parasites in the Ivermectin group do a bit better because they just took an anti-parasitic.
4. A sufficiently powerful statistical analysis correctly detects that the two groups got different COVID outcomes.
What part of that do you think won't happen in the real world?
> He also pushed raw milk when prior to pasteurization, milk was the cause of 25% of all communicable diseases (it’s a great medium for bacteria, it has avian flu viruses, parasites, etc). We invented pasteurization for a reason.
Raw milk is legal to sell in most of Europe and they still have overall better health outcomes, so at the very least it’s a triviality.
Europe also has higher standards for animal husbandry and food products.
In most of Europe you can sell unrefrigerated chicken eggs. Why? Because chickens in the EU are vaccinated against salmonella, so the eggs don't need to be washed (and consequently it's also safer to eat poultry in the EU).
I'd be happy to sell raw milk on the market if there's a requirement that raw milk be tested for common pathogens to milk (Like listeria, for example).
> the real reason for US health decline is too much sugars/carbs, too little exercise, and addiction to opioids and nicotine.
I think a more fundamental root cause is that US regulation has failed to adequately keep up with the playbooks of large companies that stand to profit from various products that result in compromised health.
Take a look at what's being heavily advertised/marketed. If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny. (Same goes for widely used B2B products that affect what people consume.)
Unfortunately, there's too much "we only test in prod" going on, so it's hard to isolate widespread problems to a single source. That's why (in my opinion) the FDA should require clinical trials and use an allowlist-based approach to food additives. Currently it's a denylist, which amounts to testing in prod.
> If it contains ingredients people haven't been consuming for thousands of years, I think it's suspect and should be subject to intense scrutiny.
There are plenty of carcinogenic ingredients that have been consumed for thousands of years. There are plenty of additives that are effectively just refined versions of chemicals commonly/naturally consumed.
A prime example of a commonly consumed cancerous ingredient is alcohol.
My point being that prod is already littered with bugs and the most responsible thing to do is continuing research on what is being consumed to figure out if it is or is not problematic.
> I mean within reason. Of course the FDA can't and shouldn't ban alcohol.
Certainly, but we are now at a sticky point where "reason" can be different things to different people.
Both BHT and FD&C are far less toxic than alcohol is. BHT and FD&C have both been integrated into the food supply for decades. The question would be, what would we learn from a clinical trial that we wouldn't learn from the ongoing population study?
I'm certainly not advocating for deregulation or looser standards for food safety. I certainly support the FDA being fully funded and actively investigating ingredients to ensure public health isn't being torpedoed because it turns out too much salt actually causes cancer (I don't believe it does, this is just an example). But also, I'd say that ingredients that have already been in the food supply for a generation are probably not the danger their detractors claim. At this point, we need evidence to say these additives are dangerous as the current weight of evidence (a generation eating this junk) points to them not being a primary contributor to negative health outcomes.
All that said, I certainly support the idea of applying a very high level of scrutiny to new ingredients. How the current set of GRAS ingredients made it onto the market was reckless.
I'll also say that this is not unique to him, it's how conspiracy minded people operate.
You'll see exactly this playbook playout with flat earthers. "We can't know the earth is round because it's not been tested." or "It's actually industry captured" or "The US government prevents people from doing real tests to see if the earth is flat".
You see, if you asked them "what would it take for you to abandon this theory" their honest answer is "nothing" because any counter evidence to the theory will just get wrapped up in more conspiracy.
What would it take for me to abandon my belief in evolution? Evidence that explains why things appear to evolve and shows what actually happens instead.
What will make me abandon my support of vaccination? Evidence that shows vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they protect against.
I have avoided so many pointless arguments (or "debates") by leading with this question! I ask, "is there something I could say that would make you change your mind?" If the answer is no—if they can't tell me what will move them off their position—then I can say, "well let's not waste our time here, yeah?" and change the subject.
It's not perfect. But with otherwise-reasonable people, it's a nifty trick.
I worked for Google for almost 14 years. Never did they, any other engineer, or even product manager I know of, ever suggest to snoop into cloud customer data, especially those using Shielded VMs and Customer Managed Encryption Keys for attached storage (https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/using...). I've never seen even the slightest hint, and the security people at Google are incredibly anal to a T about the design and enforcement of these things.
This stuff is all designed so that even an employee with physical access to the machine would find it very difficult to get data. It's encrypted at rest by customer keys, stored in enclaves in volatile RAM. If you detached the computer or disk, you'd lose access. You'd have to perform an attack by somehow injecting code into the running system. But Shielded VMs/GKE instances makes that very hard.
I am not a Google employee anymore but this common tactic of just throwing out "oh, their business model contains ad model ergo, they will sell anything and everything, and violate contracts they sign to steal private data from your private cloud" is a bridge too far.
Crime is down, mic of the city is gentrified and the total number of homeless in CA and SF is roughly in the same range it’s been since Reagan was governor.
A lot of this BS about CA and how bad things are seems to be from people who haven’t been here long or people overdosing on right wing media which has Non-stop been attacking CA for 30 years nightly, all the while it has continued to become more and more dominant economically.