Never heard of Triller. TikTok can't be competed with because it's already too big. Try competing with Facebook by creating an app that does basically the same thing, you will almost certainly fail to become bigger than Facebook (obviously).
Byte tried it, and hasn't seen good growth at all. TikTok has too much money to spend on advertising, and too many users that they've already won. Competing with a similar app is just dumb at this point, move on to something else.
How subjective is "27 million users"? TikTok and it's ilk are such viral-driven products I imagine metrics like DAU are gamed to Narnia and back. They NEED those metrics to sing to get funding and advertisers.
Cancer’s not one thing but there’s some things you can do to generally improve your odds.
A doctor and an oncologist won’t tell you these things because they’re not even thinking about them. They likely don’t even know how to answer the question “can vitamins help some cancers?” Instead, mine repeated word for word responses about how we get most of our vitamins from a healthy diet. Then said he’d have to look it up.
Ask them about IGF1 levels, fasting, ketogenic diets they mostly won’t know. They simply say there is NOTHING you can do to prevent getting cancer.
It’s the system’s fault, the doctors and surgeons are just human beings who have no incentive to be practical.
I know we’re not supposed to refer to downvotes, but I had cancer and I worked in medicine. My points are valid and downvoting them is analogous is to the collectivist groupthink in medicine.
I always criticized the idea that “radical technology could exist but the competition buys it up” as a naive conspiracy theory.
It’s pretty remarkable that the government paid for this but somehow the international medical corporation can swoop in, buy the competitor who is threatening their margins, and void the contract.
Another line of inquiry to pursue would be why it took the government five years from canceling the Covidien contract to ordering ventilators from Philips.
It does not look like a regulation problem, but a contract breach: the buyer corporation should be held accountable to execute the contract as agreed, it bought the company with everything - assets and obligations.
The government often makes decisions about companies buying other companies.
If a company has a contract with the government, then the government should have (specified already in the contract, perhaps) the right to prevent the sale of the company (with some specific exceptions).
The primary problem here is that in theory, the government works for the people; but also in theory, the (publicly traded) corporations work for the shareholders.
But yes, even without regulation, the government should have made more effort to enforce the contract. Perhaps the key government people with the power to do so were influenced somehow... But even if the contract had been upheld, there's certainly no guarantee that the new big company would have put their best effort into meeting the original goals of the contract (especially if it was against their "best" (profit) interest).
We believe many things to be true, that are not true. And not only do we believe them, we passionately defend them!
I don't think many of us would recommend writing software on top of such uncertainty, yet we seem to think it's possible to do so with a society and economic system. Then we're surprised when it blows up in our faces every decade or so.
The surprised Pikachu meme seems fitting.
EDIT: To those who disagree, I'm rather curious to know the specifics of why you disagree. Do you actually believe that humanity, and each individual in it, has evolved to the point of something resembling omniscience? Perhaps we don't know everything, but that the subset of everything that we do "know", is absolutely perfect, not the slightest imperfection, however small?
Have our various societies and financial systems evolved to the point of near perfection?
And if it isn't that, then is it something else I'm off on? Just trying to get a better understanding of what the situation is here.
The short answer is, much of what we believe, both individually and collectively, is simply incorrect. In this case, my perception is that a person believed something to be untrue due to the idea having been labelled a conspiracy theory, and then after reading this story, he was less confident in the belief.
Generalized, we might state this as: the perception of high accuracy in our beliefs is illusory. Not only does this occur at the individual level, but also at the group level (see: religion, Trump supporters, etc)
I then compared that to the manner in which different people exhibit "unexpected" differences in insistence in accuracy/quality across different domains, demonstrating that the inner workings of this behavior can be counter-intuitive at times.
In light of this ongoing global pandemic, I am curious whether this "illusion of truth" phenomenon that psychologists suggest occurs within human consciousness may possibly have been a contributing factor to some of the perceived shortcomings involved in our response.
For example, as I understand it, Donald Trump seemed to believe that this pandemic was not terribly important, and the result of this was that the response from the United States government was slower than it could have been.
Similarly, prior administrations, I'm not sure going how far back, were also aware of the possibility and consequences of the outbreak of a global pandemic. It would have been possible at that time to make a significant permanent investment in nationwide infrastructure for stockpiling critical supplies, but for specific reasons not known to any of us, it seems like very few countries went forward with such an initiative. Not only in the United States, but many other countries.
Generally, I think it's fair to say that historic decisions related to pandemic response were less than optimal. Assuming this is true, it seems reasonable to speculate that a misunderstanding of risk was a contributing factor to the imperfect responses.
If we take a hypothetical example of two different countries, one with a brash, super confident leader, and the other with a much more restrained, cautious leader, one who is naturally distrustful of casual optimism and a culture of "don't worry about it", might these two leaders have had different perceptions of risk, and as a result made different decisions and taken different approaches, both during and in the years before an actual outbreak occurred?
I believe this is possible, and also that the magnitude of the difference may be significant, depending on the circumstances
And if that scenario is possible, might this phenomenon also occur in other domains, and if so, what might the plausible range of possible consequential variances look like?
Take the Iraq war as an example. Might it be possible that errors in perception of risk were a contributing factor in the decision to go forward with the war? Using a similar example to the one above, might a leader or society that insisted on a higher standard of certainty and trustworthiness of evidence have made a different choice on whether to proceed with a war? And if so, might this have had an effect on the amount of money spent as well as the number of casualties? I suspect that if the Iraq war did not take place, both cost and casualties would be significantly lower than they were under the scenario that actually did play out.
So what? Well...if we made better decisions, might we realize better outcomes? This seems both plausible and potentially significant to me.
If one assumes this is true, a question arises in my mind: should we perhaps consider collectively exerting additional effort towards the goal of making better decisions, and what are some of the things we could do in an effort to achieve that?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting we do such a thing at this particular point in time, and I'm certainly not insisting we do it. It's mostly just an idea I've had knocking around in my head for a while.
The only thing I can respond to your lengthy comment is: politics as we have it now is rigged in the favor of populist "leaders" that do what people want them to do, not what is the right thing to do. With "one man, one vote" the lower 51% less educated and intelligent part of the voters will elect the politicians that play their tune, even if the other 49% that are more qualified will vote otherways. In a way, it is the dictatorship of the stupid (no intention to offend someone, just math and basic psychology).
I found some of my father's school books from ~ 1960: that close after the war, it included lots of war-like information like how to use protective gear (not top NBC one, but how to improvise if needed), how to carry a stretcher, first aid, etc. Now people forgot about war, this is no longer in the school teachings and people lack self-preservation skills. If a country leader tells them to self-isolate, they will laugh and ignore until it gets serious and in hindsight they blame politicians. When you have no pandemic for 100 years you don't care about ventilators and ventilator contracts, you care about unemployment, taxes, football and the last iPhone models.
History is always forgotten because regular Joe and Jane don't read history and Einstein has a single vote.
> The only thing I can respond to your lengthy comment is: politics as we have it now is rigged in the favor of populist "leaders" that do what people want them to do, not what is the right thing to do.
I mostly agree, but I would replace "populist leaders" with something like "the rich and powerful". If you think back to before Trump's election, can you remember anyone complaining about the system being rigged in favor of the rich and powerful?
> With "one man, one vote" the lower 51% less educated and intelligent part of the voters will elect the politicians that play their tune, even if the other 49% that are more qualified will vote otherways.
I agree a lot with this also. Where you and I likely differ quite substantially is in the designation of who belongs in the groups "less educated and intelligent part of the voters" or "more qualified". I consider concepts like intelligence and qualification to be highly dimensional, where most people seem to see it as uni-dimensional (here I must speculate, because ideas like this seem to be a rather sensitive subject for many people).
> In a way, it is the dictatorship of the stupid (no intention to offend someone, just math and basic psychology).
I would absolutely love to see the math behind this, are you referring to a specific paper of some kind?
> If a country leader tells them to self-isolate, they will laugh and ignore until it gets serious and in hindsight they blame politicians.
This seems true enough, there have been all sorts of people on TV laughing it up on the beach with full knowledge that a global pandemic was underway. It would be nice if we could find a way to put some additional sense into these people's minds.
> When you have no pandemic for 100 years you don't care about ventilators and ventilator contracts, you care about unemployment, taxes, football and the last iPhone models.
110% agree here - it's true, and it is a very big deal, imho.
> History is always forgotten because regular Joe and Jane don't read history and Einstein has a single vote.
Yup. The interesting thing about that though, is that hardly anyone reads history. Take HN for example, I'd be surprised if even 10% of the people here would remotely qualify as "students of history", yet I suspect the percentage of people who consider themselves qualified to deploy phrases like "History is always forgotten..." would be up around the 90% range. Obviously I'm not referring to you here since I mostly agree with everything you've said, but I suspect I'm at least in the ballpark.
I forgot to tell: you are focusing on US (the Trump mention), I work in a US company (so I keep up with the situation there) but I live in Europe and I see the situation in the countries around me: it's full of populism, not "the rich and powerful".
I don't have a specific paper in mind for the math, but the knowledge from college with a major in statistics (and demography). It does not make me an expert, just a bit more qualified than most people.
One of the most absurd consequences of CarPlay is the USB car ports are often 1 amp. So my phone dies faster. Combined with Apple forcing you to use Apple Maps, makes me cynical of basic technology. This is partly what makes it more distracting.
There are super smart people I respect but they accept bad behavior as a form of pragmatism. Like they’ll excuse patent trolls because they’re just working a legal angle and trying to make money like everyone else.
This idea that unethical things are just a consequence of circumstance and survival is flawed. We shouldn’t excuse those aggressively working to increase the surveillance state or corporate profits just because that’s their job —- we can be better than that.
> There are super smart people I respect but they accept bad behavior as a form of pragmatism. Like they’ll excuse patent trolls because they’re just working a legal angle and trying to make money like everyone else.
They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.
They're unbelievably ignorant and likely hide that ignorance under the guise of expertise in an unrelated field literally filling your life and others with bullshit. Stop calling fuckos like the ones at Labrador "smart." Stop calling anyone who thinks they're smart "smart."
Call them "fuckos," because that's what they are...
Yeah - I wouldn't have said it so strongly but I fundamentally agree that we shouldn't excuse beliefs based on perceptions of people's intelligence. If their claim is incorrect the claim is what stands on it's own, it doesn't matter who said it. The reason that experience and intelligence matter is because they allow people putting forward those claims to make stronger arguments or know what arguments to make/experiments to run to validate the claim. Intelligence and experience can hell you make better claims, but claims shouldn't be given any more weight or validity because they come from someone with experience or a high score in some (probably somewhat arbitrary and highly subjective) score of experience - that's the core principle of meritocracy in my opinion.
But empathy can be an indicator of intelligence. If your definition of intelligence is based on ability to answer very limited questions on an IQ test, your definition is flawed. True intelligence comes from being able to reason about incredibly complex systems. This is the type of reasoning that leads you to believe that socialism is not antithetical to capitalism.
Where money can be made, money will be made. I had a colleague that was proudly saying "if it was legalsto sell heroin to kids I would be setting camp outside schools making a million per day". In my question "and what about the dead kids?"
His answer always was "not my problem, if there is no law for this or that then I'm in it"
Unfortunately there are too many assholes out there.
They are intelligent, with the ethics of a rock, and this is the outcome when these two are combined.
>They are not smart. Just stop telling yourself this about those people and stop respecting them. Stop it.
lol is this the "any alien civilization far in advance of us will be peaceful" assumption? there are hordes of very very smart people (by any metric - iq, success, wealth) that either lack empathy or are straight up antipathetic. how about we stop valorizing smart people and start valorizing empathetic people instead?
It's a systemic problem with capitalism and markets.
Any system based on brutal winner-takes-all competition and monopolistic domination is unable to deal intelligently or rationally with a significant external challenge.
Gameify certain activities by all means, but everyone needs to get real about the incredible fragility and poor long-term survival prospects of a system that thinks of mutual aid and cooperation as weaknesses that can be exploited.
After it’s over, we should investigate everyone at the CDC and related agencies, everyone in past administrations, investigate President Trump and his cabinet, investigate those tied to the corporations who outsourced our abilities to China, and determine why no one could anticipate this.
Why/how there weren’t tests for months. If only we could blame this on one person, then the solution would be easy — but this is a systemic problem.
> The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.
> The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
> The U.S. government’s slow and inadequate response to the new coronavirus underscores the need for organized, accountable leadership to prepare for and respond to pandemic threats.
The administration has essentially decided to kick the driver out and steer blind since 2018.
"These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly this plane?"
I feel like this debate is analogous to the test kits being rejected from 3rd parties, if that’s what happened. We’re lost in bureaucratic technicalities.
Verily was a division of Google X before Alphabet. It’s effectively Google Life Sciences minus the corporate advantages of the Alphabet structure.
Maybe Kushner or the President wanted to encourage Google, or maybe a speechwriter over exaggerated it. Or maybe the President lied. But when the media ultra parses the controversy to make every element the nth degree worse for him, it makes it hard to believe in objectivity at all.
...or maybe trump heard something in a briefing and said what he thought he understood, instead of what he'd been told. And without, you know, coordinating or having the speech fact checked before delivering it to millions of people. The dude doesn't do process... See also, walking back the "no trade with Europe" thing a few days ago.
He doesn't get a lot of slack (outside the right wing machine) because he's repeatedly foot-gunned in dramatic and damaging ways.
And um, when does one have to stop blaming the previous administration for the current's failings? He did not inherit a "dysfunctional CDC" that is pure BS. He has called COVID-19 a hoax, that it would but just like the cold, that you could go to work with it, and that the number would "soon be zero" (number of cases).
He has no idea what he is doing and only cares about his own reelection regardless of the risk that puts Americans in.
Yes, the best way to fix something dysfunctional is to slash its budget, repeatedly make statements contrary to what they actually say, and downplay worldwide pandemics.
Without conceding the point of prior dysfunction, I have to say that trump has yet to find a bad situation that he can’t make worse.
Right, which is why he shut down the division created to plan and prepare for pandemics, and terminated the position created to organize the response for a pandemic.
The CDC was so dysfunctional that by the swift signing of a pen the CDC has been made great again.
Of course, it took him 2+ months to actually sign the document that waived restrictions (which were Bush era, anyways, and any decent government creates laws for the norms, but provides power to override them in case of an out of the norm situation, which Trump waited 2 months to do because he insisted it must be business as usual).
As Tim Pool said, California is the king of greed. A lot of rich people secretly support him and working class people who have to deal with the societal breakdown that is California politics.
4.5 million people or 32% of the voters in CA voted for President Trump in 2016. Democracies of uneducated masses (on both sides) don’t make any one side intrinsically right. Cue Socrates.
That's why Socrates tells you that you become valid to run society when you become dialectically educated enough, and that the unwashed masses do not see reality for how it is as a result of a lack of dialectical education and therefore should not rule.
Sounds pretty much like authoritarian rationalism to me. I'd like a pass on platonic republicanism but unfortunately it's found within all forms of Western philosophy these days
After the crisis, his death should be investigated by an international group.
And those responsible for rebuffing assistance, including those at the CDC or other US agencies that rejected test kits, should be investigated.
Everyone just throws their hands up and says “incompetence” but in the real-world, a huge majority seem to believe in sinister motives. This is based on anecdotal experiences from mostly wealthy/successful people I’ve talked to. I’m a skeptic but way more people are conspiratorial than the media acknowledges.
How the US didn’t have tests in January when people were sounding the alarm, or how we don’t have general Coronavirus tests from decades or years ago is quite confounding.
I was just making what I thought was a clever counter to your endless argument. I have friends who are implicated in conspiracy theories and know well it’s a flawed philosophical system that sustains incompetence.
But set your Google search to 1970-1988, and read the old coronavirus test related papers. Ones of humans, cattle and cats. Then in ~2004 talking about coronavirus testing for SARS.
It seems like they’re at least could be a general test or indicator for all coronaviruses. Even if not, we’ve been fearing mutant coronaviruses for decades, why wouldn’t we get the tests started in November?
Poker players were betting 3-weeks+ ago that WSOP would be shut down and now the world is-
