The topic is interesting to me so I gave it a go, but by God this podcast (quite popular I hear) is insufferable. Why is everyone trying to be a comedian? Why does one of the guest sound like they’re on Valium? And I cannot stand the air of basic anti-intellectualism I keep getting from American presenters, where any piece of information is met with a groan and a joke.
I reckon not every podcast can be as excellent as The Rest Is History, for example.
I’m waiting for some coverage on the pillock from this side of the pond.
I think of the corporate death penalty as being more appropriate when leadership knew exactly what was going on and chose profits over people. Exxon, see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk0063. Purdue Pharma, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purdue_Pharma. Company gets sold for parts and Cauitebgoes to prison probably for life due to the amount of lives they potentially destroyed. Pretty much all the tobacco companies knew how harmful their product and made a concerted effort to fund their own bogus studies to throw up a smoke screen. Facebook makes billions from (for example) scams and fraudulent ads: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu.... Maybe don't throw their CEO in prison but at least fine them 10x the profit they made vs. the usual .0001%.
They absolutely will compensate you. Often they will just give you a voucher. I've even been compensated to pay for a rental car to drive myself home when things were REALLY hosed during this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_schedu...
Aren't they optional in most cases? You can opt-out of vaxing your kids today right? They just won't be welcome in public schools. I guess the other common cohort is health care workers (which seems reasonable) per https://leadingage.org/workforce-vaccine-mandates-state-who-... More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive. Hindsight is 20/20 though.
> More than 1 million people died in the US from the COVID pandemic so it seemed reasonable to work hard to get herd immunity but the backfire effect made that counter productive.
There is no herd immunity for COVID, because you can get it more than once. Vaccination only protects for a few months, and doesn't reduce spreading much.
It's not a "sterilizing vaccine".
There are sterilizing vaccines for many childhood diseases. Measles, diphtheria, polio, etc. Can't get the disease at all if vaccinated. Those vaccines can almost eliminate a disease. With smallpox, this was taken past "almost" all the way to eradication.
Here's a list of 14 almost forgotten diseases, eliminated by vaccination.[1]
The current generation of parents has not seen most of them.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
I really like the idea of adding taxes (or subsidies) to make repairing things more economical than replacing them, when this is not the case already. It seems difficult to fairly decide how to do this, but charging by rubbish weight is at least objective and easily measurable.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
The data for long term maintenance can be found but for example the government could mandate it be published for car models to give consumers more insight and be a lever to incentivize designing cars to be more easily maintainable (e.g. not have to remove a truck's cab to replace an oil filter gasket!) https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
Here is a good podcast on his terribleness: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc Some high points: Incredibly abusive to his employees, stole from Woz, screwed over his employees when Apple went public and Woz covered, refused to admit his daughter Lisa was his for many years. The man had great taste but the way he is worshipped in Silicon Valley is off-putting. Woz is a much better person to wish to emulate in my opinion.
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