It's more about how the buyers intend to use the media themselves.
The Ellisons are personal friends of Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spoken repeatedly about media as a weapon, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs. Ellison is the largest individual donor to the IDF. Trump handed Tiktok to Ellison.
The bid is backed by Kushner (i.e. Trump) and their Saudi allies.
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
So we just blatantly lie now because "Israel=bad"? You can't donate directly to the IDF. US funding isn’t paying Oracle through some back door. If you’ve got a real source, show it—otherwise it’s just nonsense.
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.
“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”
Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
That’s misleading. You can’t directly donate to the IDF—people give to NGOs that support soldiers’ welfare, not combat operations or weapons. And while Ellison has given millions to FIDF, there’s no evidence he’s “the largest donor,” and no public ranking shows that. You can dislike Israel without inventing facts.
Why do you have such an issue with the donation to the IDF? I understand disputing that he's the largest donor, but I doubt he has ever written a big cheque directly to Trump (or in fact anyone except his family) either, is it also unclear whether he's a Trump donor?
Even if there were no mechanism for donating to the IDF available to the general public, do you believe someone like Ellison couldn't easily give money to whomever he wanted?
Sadly Frontiers in Oncology is not better. Recently they published a meta analysis from „research institute” that pushes alternative cancer medicine written by people who have no domain education with no actual analysis of quoted research being done in the paper:
I know someone who was in a similar situation at your child’s age, in the Stanford CS program. He was able to pause his studies and secure some kind of agreement he could come back when he felt ready. He worked on his issues for about 15 years, barely making enough to pay rent. But then he went back and finished, subsequently got better jobs, and now he’s retired at age 49.
There’s a full-color dimming filter in Accessibility -> Zoom -> Zoom Filter -> Low Light. You can assign it to the accessibility shortcut for quick access.
I understand that nowadays when we think of AI we imagine deep learning and neural networks, but nowhere on the website does it claim that that is the case.
When I was younger I tried the generalist consultant thing. Did a bunch of interesting jobs and patted myself on the back for being able to tackle so many different types of problems, stacks, stages of the business, etc. It actually was really fun.
To my surprise though, as I got more and more general the rates I could demand got lower and lower, even though I had all these successful projects and good references etc. I finally picked up on the fact that the only companies who would consider a generalist either didn’t know what they were doing, or couldn’t afford an expert in the specific skills they needed.
Decided to specialize in something in-demand, and life got a lot easier.
"only companies who wanted a generalist either didn’t know what they were doing, or couldn’t afford an expert in the specific skills they needed." Spot on.
I went down the same path, and came to the same conclusion. Most of the time you don't even have to learn that many new skills to "specialize", you can just change the messaging and positioning on your website/resume/conversations with future clients.
I've had mixed experience here. It REALLY depends on what you're specializing in; specialization alone doesn't cut it. Also, you can get away with being a skills generalist if you instead specialize in a field/topic/etc (IMO).
So its more about positioning, I think. How you're able to sell yourself and the skills you have.
I once met a programmer who, while broadly skilled, had looked around and seen that .NET programmers were in high demand: "So, I became a .NET programmer!", and things worked out well for him.
What you say is 100% true. It's a bit sad nonetheless, companies often hire specialists when what they really need is a great generalist. Few orgs understand their own needs very well.
It's also a difficult exercise to the generalist-minded, to market oneself as a specialist. One must adopt a very reductive view of one's own skills of experiences. "From now on, I'll just be a Python programmer who specializes in backend systems for the medical industry" is hard to internalize.
Be an expert with the ability to generalize in your back pocket when you need to. A generalist skill set does not mean you have to do generalist jobs either.
I've been lucky in that respect. A lot of start-up financial firms in my sector are founded by traders looking to go our on their own. The last thing they want to do is deal with "back office" matters so it is one space where generalism pays a premium.
I've done well and been paid well but I'm moving away from generalism for other reasons.
What fields/tech stacks would you recommend to specialize on? I have nearly a decade of experience in programming but I'll probably specialize just to stay in-demand.
Sadly that logic doesn’t work here, though it’s tempting. There’s a portion of the population that refused vaccines, due to a combination of factors including misinformation. Omicron going wild would put millions of elderly people into the hospitals, jamming up the healthcare system and leading to millions more excess deaths.
So what is the endgame here? Covid is not going away. Does that mean that China will become an isolated island with waves of lockdowns for the next decades?
If that’s what suits the party best, probably. Communist dictatorships aren’t known for very rational policies when they need to save face on something.
That’s the question a lot of people seem to have, but think about it: they’ve already bought themselves 2 extra years of vaccine + therapeutics development, and beefing up of medical infrastructure. There’s no way they can do lockdowns forever, and they’re open about that in all the media. But there’s a point in those other trends at which opening up becomes millions of times less dangerous, and we’re just not there yet.
Force elders to vax. Build up antiviral stockpile. Maybe wait for milder strain. Roll out phased living with covid experiments by region. Take a few extra years to spare millions of deaths.
It's wild to me that they're able to enforce heavy lockdowns like these but aren't able to persuade everyone (or a large enough % of "everyone") to take a vaccination.
I forgot which numbers I saw, but yeah their overall rate is high. The problem is that so many of the remaining unvaccinated are elderly, so if they start getting sick they’ll get it bad and overload the system.
Another problem is that the efficacy rate of Sinovac is far lower than that of the mRNA vaccines in preventing illness, although it still drastically reduces severe disease.
Sounds like they’re only advocating incremental improvements to the current policy?
Compare China death rates over the pandemic to basically anywhere else. If saving 5-10 million lives (estimated based on % of US population lost to Covid) doesn’t count as working, what would?
We should be able to weight the cost of saving those lives vs the harm caused to those who would otherwise be fine. If we don’t have those numbers I don’t think we can define what worked and what didn’t.
Just looking at raw lives saved (especially when most of those lives are older than average age of death) is too simplistic.
Of course nobody wants to die before their time and perhaps after one month in ICU but a country the size of China has about 10 million deaths every year (1% of 1 billion.) I wasn't happy to be locked down for 2 months in a much milder way than the people in Shanghai. I'd really change country if my country had a Chinese approach to virus containment because it's going to be a really bad decade. Until China needs their people to work all the time no matter what, then covid will be banned and forgotten.
So your point is that things cannot improve when they are bad because no one can voice a contrarian view, but your evidence that things are bad is Shanghai's vice-mayor advocating contrarian views?
My point is that the only way for China to contain Omicron is to increase lockdown measures to the point that many people are dying due to lack of food and healthcare. The alternative is to abandon CovidZero policies completely and go the path of heard immunity. And in China you are not allowed to express those facts, because it means the leaders were wrong to promote CovidZero.
The Ellisons are personal friends of Trump and Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spoken repeatedly about media as a weapon, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3tdrO8bA7rs. Ellison is the largest individual donor to the IDF. Trump handed Tiktok to Ellison.
The bid is backed by Kushner (i.e. Trump) and their Saudi allies.