Not if the CIA has anything to say about it: CIA fake vaccination campaign in Pakistan[0]
...The program was ultimately unsuccessful in locating Osama bin Laden. It led to the arrest of a participating physician, Shakil Afridi, and was widely ridiculed as undermining public health.[2][3] The program is credited with increasing vaccine hesitancy in Pakistan[4][5][6][7] and a rise in violence against healthcare workers for being perceived as spies.[8] The rise in vaccine hesitancy following the program led to the re-emergence of polio in Pakistan, with Pakistan having by far the largest number of polio cases in the world by 2014.[8]
Given the period of 2010-2012, the president at the time was Barack Obama. It does not seem realistic that people would accept opening a criminal case.
Why does it matter if it was Obama or Bush in power? Sure, their politics influence the nation's foreign policies. But domestic partisan politics is largely irrelevant to the international partners. To the foreign nationals affected by it, you're just USA either way.
I mentioned just the other day, the problem with anti-intellectualism in the US and how it's fed by these sorts of egregious meddling by the administration. There are much less educated and affluent countries that are nowhere near as anti-science as the US. Yet unfortunately, the US exports it abroad too. I explicitly referred the same Pakistani case as an example of that. I'm all for Osama's elimination, but they jeopardized the entire humanity's future by misusing the vaccination program for it.
Despite a century of this nonsense (remember the radium girls?), neither political party cares enough to not pervert science in the interests of humanity. Smallpox and Polio were horrible diseases that caused untold miseries. Even the remote tribes of Pakistan knew their dangers well enough to participate in their elimination, until the US pulled off this dirty stunt. This is a deeply ingrained toxic culture that was reinforced by both parties over the decade. This should be a war crime irrespective of party allegiances.
CIA at its best, f_cking up world one bit at a time (and amount of those bits amount to quite a few kilobytes at least at this point, I can attest that every European country I've ever lived in carries some more or less visible involvements in past few decades although this one is quite a spectacular clusterf_ck)
Perhaps I'm overly an optimist, but I have a feeling we will develop the informational and psychological technology to combat the destructive misinformation campaigns that brainwash people into harming their children with anti-vaccine beliefs.
We are not there yet, because the destructive media forces are too new and we haven't developed defenses against information diseases like RFK Jr. But we will get there. Two steps forward, one step back.
As a non-American I don't care what you do, if you want to behave like irresponsible idiots without any regard for the lives of others you have that right. Just don't subject vulnerable individuals in other countries to your own bad choices (you can get the MMR vaccine as an adult if your parents were neglectful). Maybe visitors from the United States should have to present vaccine certificates at airports or be quarantined at their own expense.
> Social media has given me a rather dim view of the quality of people's thinking, long before AI. Outsourcing it could well be an improvement.
Cogito, ergo sum
The corollary is: absence of thinking equals non-existence. I don't see how that can be an improvement. Improvement can happen only when it's applied to the quality of people's thinking.
The converse need not hold. Cognition implies existence; it is sufficient but not necessary. Plenty of things exist without thinking.
(And that's not what the Cogito means in the first place. It's a statement about knowledge: I think therefore it is a fact that I am. Descartes is using it as the basis of epistemology; he has demonstrated from first principles that at least one thing exists.)
I know the trivialities. I didn't intend to make a general or formal statement, we're talking about people. In a competitive world, those who've been reduced to idiocracy won't survive, AI not only isn't going to help them, it will be used against them.
> Plenty of things exist without thinking.
Existence in an animal farm isn't human existence.
At least AI produces something. Maybe not what everyone hopes for, but there is some output that people are worth paying for.
Cryptocurrency lived entirely in the hopes that people wanted to replace regular money, and it turns out not to be a big use case outside of criminals and refugees.
The AI bubble will one day collapse too. But the Bitcoin bubble could just plain vanish.
There's nothing left in the files, so there's no need to overwhelm it. If there were anything incriminating, it would outlast the weekend news cycle and displace anything short of an attack on American soil. But anything incriminating has been redacted, so it might as well be the weekend news cycle.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic. A lot of the people currently running the world seem to have poor attention spans as well. Others have great attention spans, and I wish they'd pay attention to something different.
I'm not scared of the kids today running the world differently. Maybe it'll suck but I don't think the way it's running now is any great shakes, either.
I’m not being sarcastic. Running the world is more than just who is president… it’s who your doctors are, your electrical repairmen, your nannies, etc. It’s not like this is the only example of where the younger generation is different… we see reports everywhere that college students cannot read full sentences anymore. When you have such a generational lag (independent of outliers), it drags all of society down.
You don't just skip over ads? My app lets me set a skip for the pre-roll ads automatically.
I actually feel a tiny bit guilty about that. The ads are why the podcasts exist. Too many might drive away listeners, but too few drives away podcasters. I'm kinda baffled that the economy of it works at all.
For a bunch of them I pay for the ad free version, though I'm curious about the economics of that. As someone with enough money to opt out, I'm exactly the person the advertisers want to reach.
I listen to podcasts on my morning and evening commute (in my car). I can skip forward 30 seconds, or back 10 seconds with a click of a button, so I'm baffled why everyone else isn't doing the same??? As I'm not going to buy the thing that is being advertised I don't feel guilty - it's not like anyone is losing out.
I have more than once bought stuff specifically from the ads. I'm wearing some MeUndies socks, right now, and they're good. I really liked the hot sauce subscription I heard about on the ad. And because I use the code they know which podcasts brought me to them.
George Will's Men At Work is a good introduction to the numerous minute subtitles of baseball. It came as quite a surprise to hear why, say, shortstop and second base are such wildly different skill sets.
I'm still not a fan of the game, but I can see why those who are, are. I enjoy it a lot more when I go with someone who is seeing a lot more to each play.
I actually like the stop-and-go of American football. Each play is a few seconds of intense, simultaneous activity. You then have a minute to dissect all of that action, which can tell a different story for each of the 22 players. Even two players holding each other to a standstill can be serious drama.
To each their own, of course. But you might be surprised at how intellectual a game American football can be. It's not mere brutality, as it can appear.
And for a lot of cases, that's ok. The world is a connected place, and it's more economically efficient for that. You work best when you trust your friends. You balance self reliance, according to your best judgment.
It's sure worrying to watch a good friend become an enemy. But you won't fix that by swearing off friends entirely.
This means exactly nothing in relation to my comment, but that and the bare downvotes are actually a good illustration of my point about manufacturing consent.
It sounds as if his legacy is to be unique, a feat never to be accomplished again.
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