Not anymore. The firearms community is more inclusive than it has ever been. We - and I obviously count myself among them - see the racial disparity in access to arms as a key component of our legal strategy to get those laws overturned.
Pretty much all gun control in the US is racist in its origins and usually in its modern implementation. "May issue" is a shining example of this.
When you say "Not anymore", that must have changed dramatically in the past 2 1/2 years. The NRA's silence in the Philando Castile case in 2017 was deafening.
The NRA does not represent the entire gun community by any means. The Second Amendment Foundation has a better reputation among 2A absolutists, for example.
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> Instead, the FDA publicly retracted it's authorization for the use of HCQ and said it did more harm than good,
Why? Are the data that the FDA relied upon for this determination public?
There is a great deal of internal politics at play within the federal government. I see this as the grain of truth behind the "deep state" allegations. Without knowing more about the FDA's justification, it seems completely reasonable to suspect that they may have acted out of their own personal and institutional biases.
I was interested in hydroxychloroquine long before Trump started talking about it. It was being administered both as a treatment and prophylaxis in Italy, and was showing promising results - it didn't look like it was going to be a panacea, but it seemed likely that it would be a good first-line treatment until something better came along. It also had the added benefit of an existing production capability that was already in place and easily scaled further.
Then Trump started talking about it, and it became effectively impossible to sort out reliable information about its use. Papers started coming out either strongly in favor or strongly opposed to its use, where before there was cautious optimism.
> If the FDA hadn't done that and the treatment continued to prove effective, I think we would all generally be on board with it.
That's an interesting statement. I read that as "because the FDA retracted their authorization, the effectiveness of the treatment is not relevant". The only other way I can wrap my head around it is a more charitable reading of "it's unlikely/impossible to be proven effective because the FDA retracted their authorization" - that reasoning is so at odds with my worldview that I'm not confident that others would consider it reasonable.
I’m in the “WHO is ineffective at best” camp, but I agree with you here.
They have been conservative in their statements. I don’t recall them ever saying “it doesn’t spread person-to-person” - I do recall them saying “there is no conclusive evidence of person-to-person transmission”. At the time, given the evidence they had, that was true. From their perspective saying that it did in fact spread person-to-person and later concluding it didn’t would have been much worse; I assume they take this approach to protect their reputation of being certain before making a public statement.
The problem seems to be that lay people seem to expect WHO to be on the bleeding edge and providing comprehensive information on the latest investigation and data. That’s not what they do. They report the findings, and that’s very different.
It seems that people expect the WHO to be clairvoyants rather than reporting evidence. It's disappointing that a scientifically minded community like HN believe absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
I would love to see a follow-up to this in the form of an interview with someone (or as many people who are still alive) who worked behind the scenes at Simulmatics. The events in the article happened 61 years ago, so it’s entirely possible that some of their more junior people could still be alive. They would be in their 80s or 90s, and time is rapidly running out for such a story.
I’m 36. It’s striking to me how much has changed in my professional lifetime already - we’ve gone from rumors of data-based marketing causing issues for other companies to it being embedded in everything we do. A/B testing is fundamental to feature development at every successful company I’ve experienced in the past decade.
While the election of 1960 was before my time, it seems like fairly recent history to me. To realize that it’s closer to the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk than to the present day is disconcerting. I can’t begin to imagine what the future holds sixty years from now. Subjectively, it seems like the velocity of the societal impact of technology continues to increase. I’ve seen the rise of social media (MySpace, Facebook, Google+, and countless others that have failed). Sitting here today I see the only survivor of that - Facebook - increasingly as a legacy network that appears strong on its surface, but precariously so. I fully expect something new to hit the scene that steals the limelight and turns Facebook into a ghost town. Each time that has happened in the past the new platform has fundamentally changed the way we interact with others, both virtually and in person.
We look at the current state of technology with different eyes than our predecessors. The “People Machine” described in the article is almost certainly possible today. It exists in various forms at Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, the NSA... We see each of those implementations as limited because we have perspective on how they could be made to be more powerful and a better understanding of how models are limited by the purpose for which they are created. Our dystopian fiction today takes the dystopian fiction of the 1960s as a starting condition.
I’m only a “semi-serious” photographer at this point, but I’ve spent thousands of dollars in the past ten years based largely on the subjective quality of bokeh.
I’m actually not sure what I “normally” shoot at. I shoot manual and dynamically adjust my settings to the scene almost unconsciously.
Now I’m curious to see if I can run some statistics against my Lightroom library.
I shoot a Fujifilm X-E2, and am hoping to upgrade to an X-Pro3 fairly soon. I’ve put off upgrading my camera for years in favor of buying better glass.
My favorite/most used lens is a 23mm f/1.4. I know I rarely use it wide open unless I’m shooting at night, and in that case I’m also usually also shooting monochrome. That lens is awesome for low light and indoor candidates, and even with my generations-old X-E2 I have enough resolution (16MP) to crop in when I need to.
My next favorite is a 35mm f/2. With the crop factor, it’s ~50mm and nearly perfect for street photography. There is a quality to that lens that I have difficulty describing - the closest I can get is that it’s “Leica-like”.
I also recently picked up a used 18-55mm f/2.8-4. Zoom lenses aren’t really my thing, and variable-aperture zoom even less so. This lens was so cheap that it didn’t make sense not to buy it, and it’s turned out to be very capable as long as I’m outdoors in full light. It gives me a bit more reach, which is important sometimes for me. A lot of my photography is done either of my kids or for the dance studio I and my wife own, so while it’s not my favorite lens it does see quite a bit of use and is often the right tool for the job.
Examples:
XF23mmF1.4 R | ISO 400 | f/4 | 1/250s - Outdoor, stage shot of a dance performance: https://adobe.ly/3f9rbmH
XF23mmF1.4 R | ISO 1600 | f/2 | 1/60s - Indoor, with terrible lighting and a glossy background: https://adobe.ly/332b9IN
XF35mmF2 R WR | ISO 200 | f/8 | 1.170s - Outdoor, street photography in Cleveland: https://adobe.ly/2X6CTbk
XF18-55mmF2.8-4 R LM OIS | ISO 1600 | f/4 | 1/500s - Outdoors, my youngest daughter riding a go-kart: https://adobe.ly/3f5o6Ec
Remington tried to pivot into the semi-auto handgun market with the R51. It’s a good design, but one that doesn’t mesh well with modern manufacturing techniques. They pumped a ton of money into getting it to market, and they just couldn’t make it profitable.
I'd never heard of the R51, but after Googling it...good lord. I'd never buy it just based on its appearance. It looks more like a hot glue gun than a pistol.
