At least legally, the US had no “rights” over Afghanistan. Afghanistan was not a colony, territory or state of the US. The government was “free” to kick out the US whenever they wanted.
In practice, US foreign policy doesn't recognize international law and never really has.
The US could annex Afghanistan, and apart from the CCP doing a lot of complaining about it (primarily because they want access to Afghanistan's mineral wealth), nothing would happen.
> the NVICP is perfectly sufficient for my own needs
How do you reach this conclusion?
At a max $250k per life, paid through a secret court with the deck stacked against the plaintiff, it doesn't appear to be sufficient for anyone's needs.
It's a simple risk-reward calculation: the vaccine protects me from Covid-19. The chance of side effects is very low. The chance of severe, long-term complications that cause me more than $250K in damages is even lower.
Yeah, there's a tiny risk that I'll end up in a situation where I get screwed over, but I'm significantly more likely to suffer harm from Covid.
Your own calculations will vary, of course - this is just the math given my own risk factors.
> Well, what would it take for you to change your mind?
A vaccine that (1) did not use cell lines from aborted fetuses at any point in its discovery, development, testing, or production, and that (2) has been studied for 10 years to determine long-term safety and efficacy like we would do with any other vaccine.
SARS-CoV-2 has four antigens. The existing vaccines stimulate the production of antibodies against only one of them, the spike protein.
The existing vaccines are proving ineffective against Delta because it has mutated significantly enough that its spike protein does not cause a neutralizing immune response. They may even be causing ADE, as evidenced by the most recent data comparing Israel and Palestine.
Do you have a source for the recent data on ADE? I searched and didn’t find anything suggesting this. The only thing I see are studies that more vaccinated people are dying in Israel, but that is to be expected because the older people are, the more likely they are to be vaccinated and they have less immune response to the vaccine.
See my reply to a sibling comment. The most damning evidence comes from the comparison between highly-vaccinated Israel, where there are many third-wave deaths, and mostly-unvaccinated Palestine, where there isn't a third-wave death spike at all. Having mostly-unvaccinated Palestine as a control group is showing us that we don't know what we thought we knew.
The graphs you've mentioned in your sibling comment does not separate deaths based on vaccination. Here is another source that takes this into account. Vaccination does reduce chances of severe infections even in delta, though it's not as good as before:
> The good news is that among Israel's serious infections on Thursday of this week, according to Health Ministry data, there were nine times more serious cases among unvaccinated people over age 60 (178.7 per 100,000) than among fully vaccinated people of the same age category, and a little more than double the number of serious infections among unvaccinated people in the under-60 crowd (3.2 per 100,000) than among the vaccinated in that age bracket.
Also do note that official numbers from Palestine could be undercounted because of the situation there
Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine, with the spike protein only. The Chinese CoronaVac and Indian Covaxin are traditional inactivated virus vaccines.
That seems very unlikely. If a variant evolves that has significant evasion of the vaccines, then we should be able to retool the mRNA vaccines quickly. And T-cell response is more robust to antigenic drift than the antibody response, though not as well studied. See [1] for a very detailed investigation into antigenic drift and vaccine evasion.
Not only is that article not a study but rather a letter to the editor, but also in their last paragraph they explicitly state that ADE in SARS-CoV-2 has never been demonstrated in vivo. Here is the relevant quote from the letter:
>[...] Although this potential risk has been cleverly anticipated before the massive use of Covid-19 vaccines6, the ability of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies to mediate infection enhancement in vivo has never been formally demonstrated. [...]
A couple things though - the median age of Israel is higher than that of Palestine by a pretty large margin. Secondly, how can we be sure both places are testing at the same rate? For instance, the percentage of cases reported in Palestine VS Israel is smaller when adjusted for population size.
If you ever relinquish majority ownership of this company in exchange for funding, it will eventually become "Timeshares But As An App".
Your approach might be more principled than the way timeshare companies operate. But it also sounds like you're leaving a lot of money on the table, compared to the way timeshare companies operate. And investors won't let that continue if you can't convince them that your approach will somehow make more money than timeshare companies.
We believe the market for fractional ownership will soon be much larger than the timeshare market. People want to own a real asset and with the trend towards remote work, demand for homes in desirable places is only going to increase. Our differentiation from timeshares is one of our biggest assets, so while I agree some may push us more towards this model, it is not in line with our goals or vision for Ancana.
We started this company with a mission of making the vacation home market more accessible to people who are typically priced out. We're excited to see where Ancana goes, but pivoting into a timeshare company is not a direction we'll ever go.
It's even more complicated than that. Some nutrients are absorbed in the stomach. Most are absorbed in the small intestine. Some are absorbed in the large intestine.
Heck, some are even absorbed through the mouth and gums!
Nothing is wrong with it. Donald Knuth proudly describes himself as a programmer.
But a good chunk of the people reading this comment probably make more money than he does, and title inflation is part of the stupid game we have to play to earn outsized rewards.
The people who can't code any longer are still typically able to describe an algorithm, at least in pseudocode.
Whiteboarding Yet Another Graph Search Problem With Perfect Syntax[1] might be beyond their current short-term abilities, but I'd be surprised if they couldn't produce pseudocode and architectural design that solves most real-world problems.
On the other hand, there are plenty of "seniors" who couldn't write code in the first place.
