Health care is gold for "health care providers", NOT the person receiving the services. I've a submission about how health insurance pays for the most expensive medical interventions possible, but not for things people actually need: meals, transportation, etc.
> [...] to help save human lives when standard ventilation methods are unavailable, as for example, during the recent coronavirus pandemic.
The tragedy of our era is how Science forgot about the antidote to oxygen toxicity in the 1950's.
While sometimes oxygenation and ventilation are useful, long-term use always accelerates deterioration. I knew a guy who lasted about a month on the breathing machines before giving up his ghost.
I think the most important quotes from Feynman's address are the ones about being fooled, such as this one:
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. [0]
There are assumptions at the root of all human endeavors. We can't replicate all the experiments ourselves, so we must assume our forebears were on the right track. But there's no good process for fixing science-mistakes, when the science-mistake becomes sacrosanct ("regarded as too important or valuable to be interfered with"). For example, Feynman discusses Millikan's falling oil drop experiment, and how hard it was to replace the Millikan's not-quite-correct-but-published result.
You can have integrity and 'utter honesty' but still be wrong if your starting assumptions are wrong.
"> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—"
Good post. From my experience, it's pretty easy to fool oneself (it's happened to me too many times).
It's very easy for one to have preconceived notions or ideas about something and as such it doesn't take much evidence if any for one to be convinced that one's ideas about them are correct even if factually they're to the contrary.
Moreover, precovinced ideas and notions often stop one from reviewing existing evidence about them that one already has in one's possession. When one's without supporting evidence then the very nature of that preconception may stop one from seeking out new or additional information about them.
Essentially, one's entrenched views that one hasn't come by through a process of substantial and rigorous thought one ought to always question.
The trouble is it's easy to say that, to keep the notion ever present at the forefront of one's mind is damn hard.
The big taxi company I drove for was at the top of the food chain in the Phoenix, Arizona area because the cars were clean, cabs usually showed up promptly, and if there was a problem you could deal with the company and they'd look into your complaint.
The company started switching out to the Prius a few years before I started driving for them in 2012. My first few leases were for old Crown Victorias, because I couldn't show up early enough to get in line for a prius (some drivers refused to drive the Crown Victorias, for various reasons).
The company had economy of scale in their fleet operations that was hard to beat: mechanics who knew the Prius like the back of their hand, boneyards (for parts), connections in the automotive industry.
They couldn't compete with people willing to wear out their personal cars giving 'rides' for peanuts. The company eventually sold off their fleet of priuses and their taxi yards, and refocused on the other businesses (app-dispatched medical transportation, etc). The Company tried to build their own dispatch phone app. But it didn't work especially well - I think they eventually decided to cut their losses.
VIP Taxi and Yellowcab are still doing okay, but I hardly ever see the green prius taxis anymore.
The ease of the Uber app is and was key above everything else - which might be enough to keep them operating when they finally have to raise prices to where they should be.
Or they just switch to a SaaS model. Much leaner operations and solves at least some of the friction issues that traditional taxi service has.
Then there's one aspect of their business model that the article missed (Maybe it will be covered in part 2 or 3) which is self-driving. Apart from monopoly power, this seemed like the other exit to profitability. I'm just not sure if those efforts were little more than lip service to placate investors or an honest attempt (probably a bit of both) it seems like the rapid progress of a few years ago has plateaued and that exit has mostly closed.
You're talking about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, right? Where the Shock & Awe campaign killed ... between 0 and 6600 civilians [0]? Where 188k+ have died in the 19 years since the Neocons invaded [1]?
This is whataboutism. Obviously the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake and tragedy, but that doesn't give anyone carte blanche to do equally terrible things.
> massive improvement in care and containment practices between March and May 2020.
This was 100% attributable to Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell's rebellion video to youtube, where he called out the academic doctors for giving doctors like him the terrible advice to ventilate SARS-CoV-2 patients as the best treatment.
Dr. Kyle-Sidell's journal letter discussed his observation of hypocapnic hypoxia. This would've been easy to treat, if Medicine hadn't forgotten about #OxygenToxicity.
Corollary question: How do you help people who've been tricked realize they were mislead by 'false prophets'?
I also thought COVID-19 would be a nothing-burger, and told everyone about the time I tricked one of my passengers into believing calamity was imminent. I hired an animator to tell the story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24881670
The elephant in the COVID-19 discussion is Oxygen Toxicity [0]. I have seen precious little discussion of the Science-Fact that breathing air with >21% oxygen causes deterioration, and that ventilators cause barotrauma (damage caused by pressure differentials). Sometimes people seem to benefit from supplemental oxygen, but incorporation of the antidote for oxygen toxicity would help them recover lung function, rather than just keep them barely alive.
@Farid__Jalali tweeted about how to properly treat COVID-19 with cyproheptadine [1] and other repurposed drugs. The medical establishment didn't care, and mostly used worthless remdisivir and other harmful drugs. COVID-19 would've been a nothing-burger, if they didn't have a vaccine to sell.
As to your question, I used to place too much faith in the pronouncements of Materialist Science. Experience has helped me appreciate the limitations of the mechanical world view.
The surest way to get your brain to slow down prematurely is to consume alcohol. One of my 'older' passengers (60-70 years old) pointed out to me that a lot of his 'old people' neighbors had drinking problems.
Alcohol is inflammatory. Saw my Canadian friend yesterday - she told me about her former drinking problem, and that she'd been told vodka was the least problematic of all the alcohols. I guess beer/etc have lots of estrogenic properties? Men in Britain have a tendency to gynecomastia?
We wonder how much beer my grandfather drank while he was working on his cabin... My brother and I remember beer cans were all over the place.
My mother's recently basically stopped her wine consumption, because she wonders how much of her health problems are related to the handful of glasses she used to have every week. She doesn't miss it.
Not going to say anything about the drunks I know who are still alive.
I went to a lecture at university where the lecturer stated that she was researching gynecomastia related to the presence of estrogen in drinking water - that results from wide use of the birth control pill. By the time you drink water in London, it has already been through 12 cycles of use (if memory serves correct).
I remember that info coming out years ago and then an update saying it wasn't. What was probably correlated to better health is grapes and, to a lesser degree, grape juice.
Health care is gold for "health care providers", NOT the person receiving the services. I've a submission about how health insurance pays for the most expensive medical interventions possible, but not for things people actually need: meals, transportation, etc.
Which Interventions Can Be Paid For: The Explanatory Power of “Prasad’s Law” (hcrenewal.blogspot.com) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21728864