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I love how the lab leak theory is now mainstream but everytime I brought that up along with where the sequencing came from I looked like a crackpot.
That email and sequence came directly from China.
Look at the Jan 11 note here: https://www.modernatx.com/modernas-work-potential-vaccine-ag...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, humanity will not be able to "technology" itself out of the climate crisis. There's no better carbon removal technology than our most efficient trees.
This statement denies reason. There are plenty of ways in which we can technology our way out, even if we accept your premises (which, to be clear, I don’t but I’m willing to play ball). Indeed, our only option – save for some type of genocidal movement – is to technology ourselves out of the climate crisis. 1. Engineer trees that store more carbon in denser and long lasting root systems 2. Create drone systems to pl…
Edit sorry to offend but his false dichotomy of five years of lockdown without a vaccine just rubs me the wrong way.
But if the lab-leak hypothesis turns out to be correct than technology is undoubtedly the very thing that put the world in peril in the first place, as far as COVID-19 is concerned, before you even consider increased air travel and globalization encouraging/increasing the instant spread of modern pathogens.
"Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system, created the first mRNA COVID vaccine within two days of receiving the genetic code for COVID by email." I love how the lab leak theory is now mainstream but everytime I brought that up along with where the sequencing came from I looked like a crackpot. That email and sequence came directly from China. Look at the Jan 11 note here: https://www.modernatx.com/m…
Guy Kawasaki has made some great points about how a business, founded in capitalism, should find purpose to make the world a better place. In many cases those changes brought on by a given technology isn't obvious until the technology has been adopted in a widespread way.
Facebook may "help" people connect and discuss important matters, but it also created a conduit (deluge) of information which hijacks people's attention away from things that may serve them better in the long run. It's when technology like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms push data to us that we give way, emotionally, to the influence.
When emotions get involved, attention is diverted.
>Moderna, a product of the American venture capital system Moderna got a government grant to do the mRNA work didn't they? Seems a product of public investment. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/years-of-research-laid-g... https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/24/fac... https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
No, they got an enormous amount of VC money for years. They reached a $1 billion valuation in just two years after founding (2012), faster than Uber/Dropbox/Lyft etc did.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3609955-moderna-failed-to-disc...
And Derrick Rossi's research was publicly funded which led to creation of Moderna...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derrick_Rossi
> Rossi based his developments on the results of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman on mRNA. He succeeded in finding investors for his plans to transfer these findings into new medications and vaccinations by founding Moderna
This is a tale as old as time. Government funds labs which invent and discover. VCs then fund companies to exploit and make money off publicly discovered work.
This is Andreessen trolling to get traffic on their new publication website... Obviously technology is not saving the world. Sure we made a vaccine for a disease that was bad. But technology is mostly responsible for propagating it in the first place. And climate change, you know. EDIT: also on HN front page, fully autonomous killer drones are being mass-produced.
Jon Stewart just made that point yesterday too: “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science,” Stewart said. “Science has, in many ways, helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science.” (1) I disagree with regard to climate change though because that externality has so far been a net positive for humanity and we can solve the downside. Yes, technology enabled us to di…
The possible outcomes of a a runaway population living on a planet with a runaway climate are likely harder to predict than a simpler and smaller system.
I certainly do hope we can solve our problems with technology, but it will take concerted effort and unified attention to do so.
A tech magnate raises the bar. Goes from ‘better’ to ‘save’. Technology is heaven, himself is a god. Perhaps should be better, for all of the humanity, to tone down this voice a little bit.
Otherwise it leads to idiocracy.