Wait, been I've been told "you can't just shut down travel", and that closing borders doesn't work, for reasons that are completely self-evident. So I'm utterly mystified that there are virtually no cases and 0 deaths in countries like Russia and Mongolia that closed their borders.
...yeah it is. Remdesivir has improved patient outcomes in the majority of cases it's been used so far - no, it hasn't been subject to comprehensive peer-reviewed study quite yet, but that's an awful reason to ignore our eyes in an emergent situation like this where death may be the alternative, and highly irresponsible for Derek Lowe to ignore. You're appealing to it being proper to ignore because authorities feel they haven't gone through enough red tape yet.
Am I wrong in observing that the public health response to the outbreak seems to be far less oriented towards solving the problem, but rather using psychological tactics to convince people that everything is fine, "the risk is low", and doing nothing is the proper response? (but also you're probably going to get the virus, so prepare for that, but only by washing your hands and certainly not preparing in a way that disrupts globalism)
I agree - ran into this problem with my dad. He had a rare cancer that quickly stopped responding to hormone therapy (the only kind of treatment known to work), and deteriorated rapidly. We called Sloan Kettering to see if there were any clinical trials he could enroll in, but since my dad had recently become bedridden, he wasn't eligible for anything. I don't know if there was anything else I could have done - it seems like the argument of "he's dying and wants to try anything that has the slightest chance of working" was completely expected and unconvincing to them.
Then at his normal oncologist, a brand-new drug was recommended that only worked on cancers caused by NTRK gene fusion - but my dad would have had to get a third biopsy to confirm that and get the prescription. Why didn't they get enough material the first or second time? Nobody could say. Every step of the treatment process was done piecemeal and ultimately my dad was in no condition to get yet another biopsy. I wish there was some process by which he could've just gotten the damn pills in the off chance there was a response.
Was there not enough sample from the previous two biopsies to send out for genomic sequencing? ... also for anyone in an initial cancer diagnosis situation, ask your oncologist to both the genomic sequence the tumor and get its methylation profile, also RNA seq too. A lot of this is new technology but there are CLIA labs that will do it. You can also wait and request that your preserved samples be sent out for analysis. In many cases there should be enough tissue to send out.
Hey buddy, I'm sorry to hear about this now all-too-familiar sequence of events. There seems to be a very shallow horizon of planning for each individual case. This is probably a very human response to cases regularly spinning out of control in various ways, but still. If we could get an idea of a decision tree beyond the next blood test or biopsy it might help with planning.
>I don't know if there was anything else I could have done
This website explains it much better than I can, but the tl;dr explanation is there's no "privileged frame of reference" in relativity. Even if two frames of reference can be arranged to agree on a causal sequence involving FTL phenomena, a third observer can be constructed that perceives the sequence of events happening out of order; they get the light from effect before they get the light from cause.
This creates nasty phenomena that we don't seem to observe in nature (i.e. if the third party observes effect before cause, they can interfere with cause. Everyone loves a good temporal paradox ;) ).
>What does the ship see? They see the phone call received on Proxima Centauri. Then they see the phone call placed from Earth. Effect precedes cause: causality is violated. In fact, if the ship had a FTL phone set up in the right way, they could call Earth before Earth placed the call. They could even tell Earth "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make." Then what?
I don't understand the problem here. The ship couldn't call Earth before Earth placed the call. It would see the call being received before Earth placing the call, but if it then called up Earth on their FTL phone and said "hey, don't make that call to Proxima Centauri we just saw you make," wouldn't Earth just reply "Uh, we already made the call, you seeing old light doesn't mean these events didn't already happen." Why does it matter what the third observer sees? Cause and effect aren't violated just because it can appear that way.
"just because it can appear that way" is all "cause and effect" are.
The source doesn't do the math on the final step, but you can arrange the third observer so they emit light that reaches Earth before the phone call is sent (because we are assuming FTL tech).
Then it doesn't violate any fundamental laws of existence, does it? We're just talking about receiving delayed images of events. The ship isn't engaging in backwards time travel by contacting Earth after seeing its call being received, because Earth knows it already placed the call. No information from the future is being conveyed to Earth, and the third party isn't actually able to affect the "cause" after seeing the "effect", because the cause is over and done with.
No, you misunderstand me. Earth hasn't placed the call yet; the ship can use FTL and its knowledge of the effect to send a message to Earth that Earth receives before it places the call. The scenario you're describing is described as such in the link above:
"""
Now, you might say "wait, light takes a finite amount of time to travel. You've just shown what times the spaceship will assign to various events, but they can't see it immediately. That'll save us!" Sadly no. Here's when the ship actually gets the light from the events. [complicated figure, but it shows there's enough time in the light-cone chart for the ship to receive the 'Proxima received the phone call' event and then travel to Earth slower than speed of light and tap Earth on the shoulder before the phone call was sent]
As you can see, the light from the phone call reception arrives well before the light from the placing of the phone call. Again: causality is violated.
"""
In fact, that message can be "Place the call," which means the call is placed because Earth was told to by the third party because the third party knew the call had to be placed because they observed the effect because the call was placed... FTL allows for closed-causal loops.
I'm still not getting it. What mechanism allows for knowledge of the effect before the cause objectively happens? For the third party to observe the effect, the cause had to have happened from Earth's perspective. The fact that the light hasn't reached the third party yet seems immaterial. I'm not trying to play gotcha, seriously don't get it.
"As you can see, the light from the phone call reception arrives well before the light from the placing of the phone call. Again: causality is violated."
It's still only speaking about the perspective of the ship, and it seeing effect before cause.
> What mechanism allows for knowledge of the effect before the cause objectively happens?
Yeah, it's tough. I don't think I can explain it without bootstrapping a college semester of relativistic physics, and I'm afraid I'm not that good. :(
To start your search, "Objectively happens" is the intuition that doesn't hold water in relativity. There is no objective frame of reference (i.e. nothing in the universe is moving at 'speed zero', or more precisely, everything moves at 'speed zero' relative to itself). So everything is relative; there's no place anyone can stand and observe things objectively. Relativity changes the rules upon which reality operates so they hinge, loosely, on two fundamentals:
1) The speed of light, in a vacuum, must be observed to be the same by all observers
2) Observers do not agree on the times that they measure for when events occurred (for example, the "moving train" thought experiment shows that simultaneity is violated by relativity), but they can agree that the events align to each other subject to the Lorentz transformation when relative velocities are accounted for.
Under these rules, causality is maintained; I don't have the whole proof at my fingertips, but it can be shown that regardless of how you apply Lorentz transforms to sublight-velocity observers, they'll agree that events that caused one another have the same ordering (this is a subtlely different statement than "Two things happened at the same time," and it's partially a property of the events that are effects being within the 'light cones' of the effects that are causal). FTL travel allows one to exceed the "light-cone limit" and as a result, the causality constraint that 'effects are in the light cones of causes' is violated. The frame of reference where one event caused the other exists (i.e. there are velocities one could have where the light cones will line up that way), but there are also now velocities one can have where the light cones do not line up that way. It's only impossible for any observer to see effects happen before their causes if nothing can exceed light-speed.
For your specific question ("What mechanism allows for knowledge of the effect before the cause objectively happens?"), I think I can offer a short hypothetical thought experiment that might illuminate things. Imagine there were a door from Earth to Mars allowing instantaneous transit (so infinite velocity, in excess of speed of light). One day, the sun blinks out of existence. Earth will see this occur three light-minutes before Mars does. Someone steps through the door and yells "People of Mars! I come with a warning! In three minutes, the sun will go out! Evacuate now!"
From the Martian point of view, that person is a time traveler from the future, and the intuition relativity brings to us is that the Martian point of view is as "objective" as any other point of view. This (Lorentz-transform-violating) visitor has knowledge of an event that will definitely occur in three minutes before the cause of that knowledge has occurred.
If someone becomes a NAZI after being tossed in jail for no good reason, well hey, fuck em'.
How about we stop justifying hurting people because of their (in this case retroactive) violations of social/political norms and worry more about if our society itself is tolerable and is, in fact, sometimes perfectly deserving of extreme reactions.
No. Society doesn't need to worry about whether it's tolerant enough of "nazis" (or any hateful, violent, extremist ideologues), nor do we all need to realize that our collective failure to be adequately sympathetic towards "nazis" justifies their extremism. The "nazis" are not the real victims here. They deserve the social and political punishment they get.
>They deserve the social and political punishment they get.
If the "they" are the people supporting the punishment and torture of someone for reporting on corporate incompetence, and the manner of punishment is extremism, then your rationale leads to the extremism you want to punish. By this rationale, society deserves the extremism it gives rise to through its treatment of individuals who were not extremist before the treatment.
If you're truly baffled as to the context in which the term "nazis" is employed in reference to weev's political views as an exemplar, and don't understand how it can possibly be the case that such views and their advocacy deserve to be opposed by civilized society, I'm not going to be the one to hold your hand and gently teach you how the lessons of the last hundred years have led most of humanity to reach that obvious conclusion.
But really you're not confused at all, you're just trying to bait me into a tedious semantic argument in which you'll suddenly forget how English works and what words even mean, and I'm not wasting my time with that.
Nothing is inevitable. We're not slaves to the market. If the market means small farmers can never be as efficient as factory farms and finance, and may not have any place in the economy at all without contracting out all aspects of their farms and losing their standards of living - then F the market.
Sometimes we need to step back from these abstract principles and ask ourselves if we want to live in that kind of world. I'd rather have a country where normal people can farm, animals can live good lives, and we have values other than prostrating ourselves before the altar of GDP.
Why should the rest of the country subsidize people who want to live the farming lifestyle?
Btw, hobby farms are a thing. If you want people to be able to pursue hobbies in liu of work, you need a UBI. (Although, a smaller UBI would be suffient to allow for nearly viable hobbies like farming)
It shouldn't. Suburban sprawl was one of the major "blunders"[0] of domestic policy in the US. There is even less of an argument to be had here. At least rural subsidies can be thought of as the government paying for an overcapacity of food.
[0] scare quotes because it was fairly succesfull in its goal of segragation.
I'm not interested in arguing over how best to increase the GDP and labeling all regulations subsidies, or having the meta-debate over how everything is technically a subsidy. I'm talking about animal rights, human happiness, and how those things have very recently been assaulted by finance in an unprecedented way.
There are more important things in the world to think about than how to most efficiently stuff people full of mass quantities of cheap processed meat from suffering animals.
I'm not arguing about GDP. If I was, I would be pointing out how it is a poor metric to measure anything by.
The onlything stoping individuals from farming if they want to is the resources to afford to do so while maintaing the farmers desired lifestyle.
In the past, farmers could get those resources by selling their produce. That became less viable as other models (read, factory farming) started to offer produce cheaper. If you want to maintain the old model, someone needs to pay the difference.
If you want to argue that animal welfare is something that we should value and requires collective (eg government) action to achieve, that would be a valid arguement. You could even argue that such a change would be to the benifit of small farmers.
It's a sin for good reason, and the secular case against usury is just as strong. It's among the worst manifestations of rent-seeking, economically worthless behavior for anyone but the usurer.
This kind of lending is economic slavery. Why should a credit card company get a 15-30% return on their investment each year? How about 400%? You can use whatever clinical microeconomic language you want about risk and investment principles and rational actors and etc etc, but people now depend on credit for their basic needs. Then lenders can petition the government to garnish borrower's wages and gain eternal, guaranteed payment often on just interest. The borrower works and pays forever without even reducing the principal, and butts sit in offices redistributing wealth to themselves without adding any value to society.
It should be illegal to charge that kind of interest "investing" in the basic needs of people. The absurd prices of basic necessities in America now demand mortgages, car loans, student loans, medical debt, and credit card debt just to squeak by as a normal middle class person. Debt wasn't the solution to the price problem, but rather the cause.
> Why should a credit card company get a 15-30% return on their investment each year?
That is simply not correct. Credit card companies get much, much more return on their investment. They get free money from collecting merchant fees from every transaction, and from credit card annual fees.
If we regard the "investment" as the marginal cost of setting up yet another new merchant or credit card user, the return rate is just ridiculous.
You issue a cheap, little plastic card to someone, and get $100 per year from them, plus several percent on everything they buy. And that's if they always pay their bills on time.
(They give you that $100 willingly because out of that several percent take, you kick something back to them, which ends up adding up to more than $100 over a year.)
No. Whatever effect the 737 MAX grounding has had on Boeing's profits pales in comparison to the benefit gained by rushing the plane out the door to get in front of Airbus and thus making billions in sales contracts. There has been virtually no effect on Boeing's stock price, and the plane will probably be back in service within the year.
All in all, putting lives at risk was a good move for Boeing, and they'll surely do it again.
