nopie
11mo ago
The narrative is that in a certain sense CrowdStrike fiasco was caused by regulators who promoted its use on the basis that it ensures full security with a single tick in the box. If true, this is an example of regulator failure more than CrowdStrike failure.
Regulators have a duty to ensure that their recommendations are fit for purpose. It also includes evaluation of risks from the accepted solution. When Boeing 737 Max planes were falling from the sky, it was the fault of Boeing because they self-certified any changes. You could argue that the regulators should not have allowed that without proper overview but I would not directly blame the FAA yet because Boeing lied.
However, in case of CrowdStrike it is different because they relied on 3rd party software and that puts more responsibility on the regulators to ensure that CrowdStrike service really works and the remedies are in place when it fails.
Another case of improper regulation is covid vaccine mandates in many countries. In certain conditions vaccine mandates could be justified, for example, in case of a very deadly, fast spreading disease and very good vaccine which is not the case with covid. The regulator failure here is even more apparent because vaccine mandates were introduced after the data about vaccine inefficiency to prevent infection and spread of covid was already published in peer-reviewed journals.
I am not arguing for stronger or more regulations, I am demanding better regulations which fulfil their purpose instead of ticking boxes.
nopie
27d ago
I don't know why people are so upset. Trump was awful, Elon tried to use him for his purposes, it failed, so he is now against him. There is no point for Elon not to be against Trump now. It all seems totally normal to me, that's how I would act in his place.
nopie
4mo ago
1% of a national budget spending on strong antibiotics, that would terrify me. Clearly that cannot be right.
Obviously costs include much more than cost of drugs but workforce, transportation, storage in Philippines most likely are cheap. Drugs for treating resistant TB are expensive but not that expensive to be 1% of the national budget.
Maybe they are, I don't know. My intuition is that USAID probably spends 5% on medicines and 95% on everything else, salaries to western volunteers, rent etc. that are normal for the US but very high compared to local prices. The local government could probably do it for a fraction of cost.
nopie
11mo ago
I think Elon did the right thing.
I have never heard about Crowdstrike. No computer I work with had it installed.
I totally understand that an average user is clueless and we need to protect him from his own actions. And yet, if this is such a necessity, why wouldn't Microsoft implement it directly in the OS?
Crowdstrike might be bleeding edge The need for bleeding edge is always overvalued.
It reminds me all times when everybody was trying to install antivirus software. Instead I always removed it because it only consumed resources and provided very little benefit. The best protection was to limit what user can do – do not install unauthorized software, don't even browse internet for fun, just use your work assigned software and web sites.
I think those who relied on third party antivirus software had worse outcomes because their users were more relaxed and less disciplined. At the same time those antivirus software makers got rich.
Probably the same has happened with Crowdstrike. Gradually Microsoft will implement something similar for no extra cost, everybody will realize that Crowdstrike is pointless. Until new challenges will come along and a new opportunistic company, playing on people's fears will convince to buy another scammy service.
nopie
1yr ago
Scott Alexander needed years to realize that yes, Biden is on his path to dementia. Maybe it is just that now more bettors have finally realized what is going on.
With the public information we had strong priors that Biden shows signs of likely dementia and if true, it will be progressing. Recently we saw how much it had progressed. Now we can estimate how much worse Biden will be in 1 month, 2 months, 4 months etc. with quite narrow confidence intervals.
As Anatoly Karlin says – it is all programmed. Previously people just refused to believe these bad news.
Similarly it was with effectiveness of masks in preventing covid. I didn't see any prediction markets but many people wanted to believe them to be effective despite all the evidence. When it was all reviewed and Cochrane review was published many still refused to believe that the evidence for any benefit is non-existent. Politicians are especially resistant to negative scientific findings but eventually they will be forced to accept reality in one way or another.
nopie
27d ago
Not staged, it is real.
Obviously, many things said in anger now, can and will be taken back. Don't take them too seriously. But the fight is real.
I think that HIV is rather irrelevant in the US because most people, including drug addicts have correct beliefs about it. They will try to use clean needles when injecting to avoid getting infected and so on.
I just look at this from public health point of view – if beliefs are causing people to make wrong health choices, then how can we change those beliefs?
Atul Gawande writes in detail how polio vaccination programs worked in India. The organizers knew that some people have beliefs that polio vaccine is causing disease or making people infertile etc. They also knew that shaming people or forcing vaccine doesn't work. If someone refuses, calmly explain why vaccine is beneficial and move on. In one episode the supervisor who otherwise was calm about all problems, got angry to vaccinator who berated a mother for refusing to vaccinate her child. He said, “she was listening to you before but now she will not listen at all”.
This approach was slow but successful, polio was eradicated in India. One has to be very stoic by allowing people to make wrong choices and then empathising with them when bad things happen without the slightest reproach.
Somehow we forgot all this and during covid acted very irresponsibly by forcing people to get vaccinated, by shaming them officially etc. Child vaccination rates predictably are going to fall and it will be hard work to improve them again.
With HIV beliefs in Africa, it's probably because we don't have vaccine against HIV so they never had contacts with field workers like that. Those people with HIV in Africa who happen to be involved in programs that provide treatment, quickly understand how all this work. But there is no a systemic reach like going from home to home to vaccinate or treat everyone.
The leaders could do that but they are tribal leaders. They have no capabilities to think or act rationally. It requires deep political scheming to entice them to implement such programs. The WHO is often accused to be working for China and other dictators but I don't see a way how they could not be. Otherwise those dictators are not going to listen to them.
Why do you believe that CrowdStrike provides value?
Maybe it does but where is the proof? The half of the world didn't use CrowdStrike and how did they fare?
I would even say, let's do RCT to prove that CrowdStrike improves outcomes. It is perfect case when it could be done.
Maybe nobody wants to do such a test because they are afraid that it will show that CrowdStrike provides no value.
Remember masks during covid. The evidence is that they provided either minimal value or no value at all. And yet the government mandated their use in many countries. Sometimes people do stupid things on large scale.
nopie
26d ago
In such situation the US would indeed just print the money to save itself from bankruptcy causing immense inflation. It will cause worldwide financial crisis. It is possible that the GDP for many countries will fall by 50% or even more.
That will not be good neither for the US, nor the world peace. Possible some other countries will arise more arise more powerful, especially China, Russia or Iran. The countries who have learned to become more resilient due to constant sanctions.
nopie
3mo ago
Obviously the support for Zelensky is high. The fact that we cannot know the percentage with high precision doesn't mean that we don't know the percentage with error margin that is less than ±10%.
Is his course good for Ukrainian people? Who knows. I personally think that Ukrainians are too obstinate to consider they could ever get Crimea and other territories back. It prevents them thinking more about how to protect the rest of Ukraine. But that's their choice. Ignoring this will not be productive. Suppose the US forces Ukraine to do elections and Zelensky is again elected. Then what? Or someone else is elected with the same aspirations as Zelensky.
And forcing to elect a certain leader that yields to the US will lead to a new Maidan. Ukrainians want free elections not some US or Russian stooge.
nopie
11mo ago
It's unusual but doesn't seem weird to me. Blind (the community notes say blind and poor vision) are not always blind from birth. They might have internal representation of colour and specifying blue suit can be useful for them to have her image in their minds.
At first her mentioning her pronouns seemed weird but then again – for blind people it could be helpful in certain cases.
nopie
11mo ago
Wikipedia reports that 5.9% flights were cancelled worldwide. It's definitely a lot of flights but also not that much on global perspective.
Twitter had flightradar24 animations showing flights disappearing with Community Notes saying that this animation is fake and not from CrowdStrike fault event. You wouldn't really notice 6% decrease visually or would notice only a slight reduction.
People love to lie on twitter for dramatic effect.
If we assume 6% reduction of global economic activity for one day, it certainly is loss of billions of dollars. And yet it is less than one extra holiday per year.
Of course. In those days you could die from anything else before you would die from covid. In fact, it could even be coronavirus-1970 that was worse than Sars-CoV-2. We just didn't notice it because we expected people to die at this level every year.
There are always different ways to look at the same data. With Covid certain level of deaths were inevitable. Everything that was above that we brought upon us ourselves.
Comparison of extra mortality during pandemic period between periods and/or countries can be even more fun.
Pandemic reduced life expectancy by about a half year, maybe up to one year in very unlucky countries. At the same time life expectancy in Sweden currently is roughly 4 or 5 years higher than in the US. Obviously there are some public health and/or cultural issues that make it impossible for the US to catch up with Sweden in short term. Some could even argue that it is more important to preserve freedom and dynamics, maybe even more quality of life instead of longer life.
Even if you accept those arguments, it still means that there are certain policies that impact life expectancy metric worse than covid. If preventing covid was an easy fruit to pick, the US should have prevented it. But it wasn't. Most likely the US robbed people of their agency, their freedoms and caused more harm than it would have done by implementing different policies to catch up Sweden in life expectancy.
Sweden refused to implement harsh and mostly useless policies exactly because their public health leaders were worried about life expectancy. Whereas the US and most other countries just followed the narrative which was wrong.
nopie
11mo ago
It wasn't. It was on the level of flu outbreaks in 1970s.
The US had higher excess mortality than some other countries, totally due to unnecessary and wrong measures taken.
nopie
11mo ago
I am in the UK but I didn't vote.
My only concern is economy. I don't see anyone having any ideas whatsoever about it. My only hope that we don't know how but maybe some unknown figure will ascend unexpectedly to the power and will make necessary reforms. When Gorbachov became a leader of the USSR, no one suspected what will follow. Ironically, Russia has returned back to old ways of self-isolating from free trade.
nopie
1yr ago
The issue with Biden's dementia was revealed by Biden himself 4 years ago. In one response to Trump he revealed that he knows the details of the test used to assess dementia. Apparently he had been evaluated by doctors already then. We just have never been told the results and how they have changed with time.
Leaking this information would reduce uncertainty but essentially it would be the same that we can infer from videos but more precise.
nopie
3mo ago
I think that a lot of young people today are very sympathetic to communist ideas especially in Latin America. I don't understand why, probably due to lack of growth, high unemployment, especially among young people.
For me it is unimaginable because I grew up in the USSR and we all hated it. Yet, a lot of old people are nostalgic towards the Soviet times. They had hard time to adapt to competitive system. I can understand that. Transition had to be done in more thoughtful manner. In Russia it is probably even worse due to widespread corruption and inequality.
We had to study communist ideology, read Marx and other works already at the primary school. It was very boring. I don't understand how people can find them inspiring at all. At the same time other teachers let us know, in short passages, what was wrong about the Soviet system. Biology teacher told about Lysenkoism, others mentioned deportations and so on. I think that we all grew up more like Kolgomorovs, knowing well what to say to authorities to survive, while retaining a different perspective in private. When Gorbachev started his glastnost (openness), the gates opened and the Soviet system could not survive.
I don't believe that this is a case with all communistic countries today. Maybe Cuba is similar but in North Korea people are probably too brainwashed and not sufficiently educated to be willing to reject communism.
nopie
11mo ago
The audience actually found it very funny, they laughed and cheered.
I think it just that showbusiness is very fickle. It can give sudden fame and glory and then can throw down to the earth.
While I agree that cancel culture is bad, I have no sympathy in this case. Who is to say that the fame and income of those performers was really deserved?
nopie
1mo ago
"You should deal with COVID a certain way Or We'll All Die" has built-in life-or-death stakes,
The problem is that it is not true. Covid wasn't ”we'll all die”, it was just framed that way.
nopie
3mo ago
Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation.
I don't think that this is going to happen. The progress can be slow at times but following evidence-based practice is not a partisan thing, it is just a way forward. Takes a lot of work, hard work assessing evidence, figuring it all out, learning who can you trust since no one person is able to do fully etc.
It is said that currently about 50% of medical practices are not strictly evidence based. It takes time to re-evaluate everything, do high quality studies and so on. Many doctors have their own biases and can be very resistant to change. Maybe it will never be that their recommendations are 100% or even 99% based on good evidence. But I expect that it will become better with time as it is much better than it was 50 or 100 years ago. Maybe there will be some temporary setbacks in some places. That is also expected and in a way it is also good as it will provide a control group :)
nopie
3mo ago
To me it is interesting why Kennedy while believing the scientific evidence, delves so much into speculations that are known to be without strong evidence?
In a way, it could be healthy skepticism. We can benefit by examining our beliefs once in a while. Science changes, new evidence appears and sometimes people forget to update. But it doesn't seem what is happening here.
Maybe it is just that his tribal consciousness has become stronger with age that now it supersedes his rational thinking.
Most people are very tribal. They don't think deeply and just repeat what their tribe leaders tell them. Only a rare person is looking for truth. That is a hard work and requires to be in constant defiance towards the rest of the society who is very tribal. At the end you get tired and decide to live like everybody else, have an easier life and even make some profit.
It doesn't get worse.
Before invasion in February 2022 certain western leaders offered Zelensky a ride. Basically they told him not to resist to save human lives. The reality was that Ukrainians would have resisted anyway but most probably would have lost. It would have led to terrible retributions from Russia. Think about Bucha multiplied hundreds of times.
Obviously, we cannot with 100% confidence say what would have happened but the idea is that Zelensky saved a lot of lives. Now pacifists are angry with him that he didn't save all lives. A lot of Ukrainians still perished and still dying on the battlefield.
It is a very hard concept for many to accept.
P.S. Unrelated to the war, but the same unwillingness to accept that some deaths will happen anyway let to higher mortality during covid pandemic. Still majority haven't accepted that despite clear data that Sweden fared best of all. They had about the same mortality from covid that the UK or any other western country and yet their excess mortality was practically zero whereas it was very high in the US. Why? The secret was to tolerate some deaths from covid as inevitable. There was no need to call Tegnel a nazi like some politicians did it hastily.
Not everybody noticed that Lex's Russian is actually poor. He is a native Russian speaker but his vocabulary is stuck at the level of 11-year-old and is not sufficient for discussing complex and abstract ideas. When speaking Russian, he takes long pauses and uses simple sentences. Somewhere he even mentioned that he is not fluent in Russian.
Zelensky's Russian is much better but clearly he decided against it, apparently he thought that it will not improve his chances to be better accepted by Russian speaking community. He explained that he tried speaking in Russian shortly after invasion in 2022 and no one listened to him. He is probably right. While translation is less effective than direct address, Ukrainian is actually similar sounding to Russian and if a Russian speaking person has a positive attitude towards Zelensky, he will enjoy listening to his Ukrainian (it has some nice sounding vibes) while reading subtitles.
Zelensky is also right – if someone doesn't want to hear, he will not hear what you are saying, regardless which language.
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