Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly" • Hacker News Board

Re: Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

#131

Post by jmpman » Wed, May 27, 2026, 5:16 AM UTC

rafram wrote: post #65

jmpman wrote: post #19

Grok is very defensive of Elon's role in the current Ebola outbreak. However if you push on Elon impacting Ebola monitoring, it will eventually admit that Elon's DOGE cancelled "some" Ebola prevention efforts very briefly, but in reality many Ebola related contracts and programs were not fully restored. "Surveillance capacity in eastern DRC weakened, contributing to the current Bundibugyo Ebola strain circulating und…

Why are you writing about / thinking about the things an AI model said to you? It’s an LLM trained heavily on Elon tweets and pro-Elon internet content. Of course it’s going to say nice things about Elon. It’s an LLM, not some kind of oracle. It seems like the existence of a massive Ebola outbreak is more worthy of discussion than some random LLM output related to it!

I have a theory that you're less likely to be sued by Musk if you're quoting his LLM's statements about him.

Re: Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

#132

Post by somenameforme » Wed, May 27, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #130

somenameforme wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BYDs aren't just cheap, they're also great cars. Western economies have become extremely dysfunctional, probably in large part due to everything being run by bottom feeder MBAs who can't see beyond the tip of their noses. It's not only possible to have cheap+good, but I think ultimately necessary for a healthy economy.

If you are not comparing by price then what's the point of this? I only replied "don't compare by price" because it seems like the original comment was doing it and it is a very common mistake. If you are correctly comparing a cheap Chinese car with an expensive EU car then you are not making that mistake.

I still don't get what you're trying to argue. Price obviously matters. If two cars offer even remotely comparable value and one is priced at $10k and the other is priced at $50k then the latter is going to play basically no role in the global market, or even domestic if our $10k car isn't banned.

We might look at something like Aston Martin. They make great cars, but they're very expensive and not that much nicer than just a 'regular' car. As a result, the company is now on the verge of bankruptcy. And BYD (and Chinese companies more generally) are essentially doing the same thing to those 'regular' cars that they did to Aston Martin, to say nothing of other EVs. If the West can't relearn how to produce cheap + high quality, then we will have no role in the economy of the future, at least not if China maintains on its current trajectory.

Re: Ebola Outbreak Now Third Largest Recorded and "Spreading Rapidly"

#133

Post by bigyabai » Sat, May 30, 2026, 9:26 PM UTC

maldev wrote: post #111

lr1970 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the US declines, it’s not that a new leader will come in. What's about EU? EU is bigger than the USA in total population and it has comparable if not larger total GDP. Why did not they step in where USA failed?

The US has about a 50% higher gdp, while having 30% less population. Not only this, but the EU can barely fund it's military obligations, let alone others. You frame it as the US failing, but I think it's more the US winning since they didn't really lose anything. I would argue they gained, since now the EU and it's competitors are having to spend money to solve things like this, and the EU and Asia are far closer to…

> the EU can barely fund it's military obligations

The EU funds it's military just fine. You're upset because of the EU's obligations, which are non-binding and demanded by the US (who isn't in the EU).

> Why should the US fund some people in Africa

Because it's cheap, and the knock-on effects save American lives? It worked during the last Ebola outbreak, why do you think it would stop working now?