I am not from the US but I think Amazon has much more market dominance than Costco. If Amazon had 20% market share nobody would mind, but they don't have real competition that comes close.
Amazon has less than 20% market share in retail overall. Remember their competitors are not just the online sellers who are pushing this antitrust angle. It’s Walmart and Target and grocery chains and CVS and Walgreens and brick and mortar department stores and so on.
Doctors told people smoking is healthy in the past. Harvard apologized for pushing sugar as healthy 60 years ago. Flat Earth was the accepted truth at some time, and Round Earthers considered nut jobs. Not being able to questioning anything "science has settled", would basically kill advancement.
> all this “believe experts” dogma is legit indistinguishable from the rhetoric of evangelical christians. ffs please just go to church and leave science to the skeptical assholes.
This implies the experts are giving their opinions in the same style as church leaders, which is blatantly false, and probably a little dangerous to equate.
"Believe the people who will explain themselves to a degree you'll understand, and who change their opinion when new information is presented." is a more complete way of expressing that thought. There are other ways of expressing that thought, I wouldn't be surprised if `pg has an essay on this.
Skeptics are right to be skeptical, but what "skeptic" usually means in modern culture is, "intransigent". The line between healthy skepticism and dogmatic rejection of basic reasoning has blurred substantially.
You still shouldn’t trust anyone expert or not. If they write a paper read it and incorporate its findings into your understanding of the world but don’t take what they say as gospel. This is what most people get wrong about experts.
But didn't the expert write the paper? how do I trust what's in that paper anyway? Shouldn't I replicate the results myself first before I make any changes to my beliefs? But then again, how do I trust my own results, someone could have tainted them, or the experiment itself could include bias or just be poorly constructed to eliminate confounding variables, which would of course result in an outcome that isn't useful!
A better option would be to eschew certainty. Stop trying to "know" things, and get comfortable making decisions based on an incomplete understanding of information.
It's really this obsession with certainty that keeps getting people into trouble.
My own world view is based on uncertainty and knowing that there is a vast, almost infinite, quantity of unknown stuff out there. I think the two concepts are not equivalent.
I think you're correct to say that you shouldn't take what experts say as gospel. But every individual's time and resources are limited; if I had to verify the result of everything I read from first principles, I would be doing literally nothing else with my life (no time to eat or sleep, either).
People need to do their best to judge how trustworthy a source is, and make their own decisions, but remain open to conflicting information if their trustworthy sources are later found to be wrong. And people also need to accept that any decision they make based on that information isn't 100% certain.
I don't have time to read every paper published, which is why we have people we call experts. The hope is that by having published papers public, other experts will read it and kick up a stink if there are egregious errors. Up until that point, to get on with life it is necessary to make a decision if the subject is relevant to our choices.
It is exactly like OSS. Not every user can audit the code, nor should we expect them to. But it's there and we hope that someone is.
Nutritional science is particularly bad. Trans fats were considered the healthy alternative to saturated fats, salt has been made a boogeyman on shaky gorunds, eggs have flipped between being considered healthy and unhealthy a few times, and the food pyramid/low fat movement pushed carb heavy diets that contributed to the obesity epidemic.
Ah, so it's possible that they also used a water sprinkler system at SBG2. But still, I wonder how the fire protection system (water sprinkler, FM200, or otherwise) not save SBG2?
It doesn't really surprise me that the machines are dead, but the whole place being destroyed is much more surreal.
No thanks, the pre alpha test can do other people. On top of it you still have to wear the mask it doesn't stop you spreading the virus. It just reduces the severity for the people vaccinated.
THIS IS NOT SOFTWARE! I cannot believe I continue to see this complete ignorance smugly repeated on HN. The vaccine has undergone three phases of testing including large scale release. It's been "baked" since January, the only things fine tuned have been the exact dose of the mRNA. Given the effectiveness, it's highly unlikely we'll see a v1.1 anytime soon, if ever, but if we do it would likely have to go through similar levels of testing and would be just as "pre-alpha" as this.
> On top of it you still have to wear the mask it doesn't stop you spreading the virus.
Other comments have already dealt with why we'll still need to use masks.
> it doesn't stop you spreading the virus. It just reduces the severity for the people vaccinated.
We're still waiting on final data on how much vaccinated people will decrease the spread, but everything we've seen so far indicates that eventual severity of illness correlates very closely with how likely you are to infect others. Even if this wasn't true, reducing severity is huge since universal vaccination would then allow the virus to spread with reduced health effects savings hundreds of thousands of lives.
I second this sentiment. I'd wager a few bucks that all the people pressuring others to hurry and get the vaccine will conveniently be in no rush to follow up and check whether the vaccine had any health consequences or offer to help.
Don't worry though, what is likely the "average" HN reader (30, male), is pretty much last on the list, so by the time we get it there will be tens or hundreds of millions of people who have received all of the various types of vaccines.
This is the most nonsensical part to me. If the vaccine does what they say it does (reduce severe cases) then the justification for mask wearing and social distancing is gone.
As more people become vaccinated the transmission rate will drop rapidly and people will stop complying with masks and distancing, etc. Same thing that happened in the Northeast and West when the transmission rare was suppressed, people started acting more and more normal and things reopened. Except this time, they'll have good reason to.
Can you leave these beautiful Japanese Gardens once you decided to enter or are you getting jailed there? Because you can't just leave Apples ecosystem unless willing to switch devices+ecosystem of course.
"Switching devices+ecosystem" is leaving the garden. There's really no other possible way to put it in that metaphor. You're not jailed.
The only thing keeping you there is your own desire to retain the things that are...inside the garden. The Apple software. The services. The user experience.
The one thing I can see being upset about is losing access to the software you've purchased. But switching to Apple (or even Linux) from Windows/Android means giving up exactly the same things. That's not about a "walled garden": it's just a consequence of the fact that software has to be written, or at least compiled, for a particular platform, and significant extra effort has to be expended to make it functional across platforms.
I've used Apple for 16+ years. I can leave at any moment.
Most apps I use are cross platform (Adobe CS, Cubase, Resolve), others are web based (Gmail, Basecamp, etc), my music is on Spotify, videos on Netflix and Prime, and my peripherals all work.
>Because you can't just leave Apples ecosystem unless willing to switch devices+ecosystem of course.
Well, I buy new laptop every 4-5 years or so. So if I want to move, I can always do so. If in a rush, I can always sell the old laptop in the first or second year too - with the added benefit that Macs keep their resale value better.
It's not the same though. You can be at the same time for minimizing Government involvement and even allowing ISPs to decide how they prevent/censor business models, but draw a line when they begin to censor political speech.
It's not that those are impossible stances to reconcile in a vacuum (I agree that they are not). It's the cynical way that he ignored the pleas of everyone who said that abandoning net neutrality would lead to censorship and entrenchment of big tech when it didn't affect him, and then turned around and suddenly saw the problem when he perceived himself and his party as the victim.
I was stating that the media is in a better position to censor themselves than the government is, and that the media will follow views, so people can censor the media by paying or not paying attention.
