California can't support as many people as you wish it could and replacing its SFH suburbs with cramped mixed income efficiency apartments would be an aesthetic, ecological, and socioeconomic disaster.
We might have lost the ability to solve problems and create solutions with approachable yet powerful programming environments. But think about all the abstractions, frameworks, platforms, paradigms, and design patterns we now get to learn!
But why is the pop music industry stagnant, though?
There are fewer producers, executives, and financial/logistical obstacles to creatively expressing ourselves with music than ever.
Has everything been expressed? Are we as a people becoming less inspired? Is this part of an inevitable process with any medium of expression? If so, has our collective muse moved somewhere other than music? Will technological progress be found somewhere other than digital hardware?
We've got to learn that this is an inevitable consequence of our appetite for automation and scale.
If your business is important enough that it can't risk falling into the endless hellpit of automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure, then don't build your business on automated, anonymous, hyperscaled infrastructure.
If anything, it's the middle aged who refuse to believe that technology and music can just sort of stop progressing, while the young are downloading old music and shrugging about all the the tech hype surrounding corporate stock market bubbles.
I believe that the diagnostic methods for testing chronic inflammation can and must be improved, and that chronic inflammation deserves far more R&D investment than it currently receives.
Long Covid is merely a small part of a broader story of chronic inflammation and how millions and millions of people are suffering from invisible autoimmune consequences of lyme disease, STDs, and long forgotten colds and flus that triggered lifelong inflammatory reactions.
It's the hidden cause of most cancer, a major driver of the obesity epidemic, and is surely subtracting more years of life from more people than the covid pandemic ever did. I'm optimistic that we'll have the diagnostic criteria and awareness in the medical field in the future where we will be able to diagnose, measure, and treat chronic autoimmune inflammation rather than debating whether or not everybody's faking it.
Disclaimer: Some people are definitely faking it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. I'm not disputing that. If we can start understanding it as chronic autoimmune inflammation, for which there can be solid diagnostic criteria, rather than as "long covid" or "chronic lyme disease" or whatever, we can separate the legitimately ill from the disability scammers.
> Unless you're saying that coercion is only justified on individuals if the benefit to society are well known, probable, and sizable enough to some "threshold".
This point seems too obvious to me to even warrant defending. Obviously, there must be an especially high bar to be met before we chase people down, hold them down, and inject chemicals into them.
Your argument could perhaps hold water if it were centered on the Johnson & Johnson formulation.
There is no precedent for a relatively novel technology being injected into everybody in a blind panic before a great deal of testing has been performed.
It was a huge gamble. It could have gone much worse than it did.
This period is best understood as a brutal hangover from several years of market subsidized growth. We had cheap Ubers, cheap meal delivery, and free web services all paid for by a speculative bubble which is in the process of popping.
Meta can't just admit that they don't have a viable business model or their stocks will truly crash, so they have no choice but to cannibalize their remaining customers, like how phone and cable companies screw the remaining people with landline phone service and traditional cable packages.
I chose to get vaccinated and I continue to believe it was the right decision. More data may prove me wrong. We'll see, I suppose.
But research like this underscores the point that we should not be forcing or coercing vaccination. We also should not have subjected children to years of isolating and alienating lockdowns.
For most of the American soldiers who were deployed, the Vietnamese were a barbarous and exotic other that were trying to kill them.
It would do a disservice to all of the sides of the conflict to insist that each of the films exploring it deliver a full representative survey of the perspectives.