This just reeks of bigotry or at they least of disingenuousness
Nuclear and chemical weapons, artillery were invented by West. The US remains (hopefully continues so) the only country that used the nuclear weapons against another country. All defunct European powers routinely engaged in slave trade, drug trade, ethnic cleansing (in very inventive ways sometimes as the Americans nearly exterminating the entire bison population which was the main food source for Native Peoples).
> This just reeks of bigotry or at they least of disingenuousness
...and yet, Russia today is overtly and unapologetically engaged in genocide and ethnic cleansing in it's invasion of Ukraine, not to mention what the regime has been doing in other regions such as Georgia.
If you seriously had a problem with whataboutism involving the US and Europe, you'd be seriously pissed at what Russia has been doing for over a decade. But here you are, making excuses to whitewash Russia.
Also, you may want to look up the definition of genocide. The parts of Ukraine that Russia took are almost 90% Russian ethnically.
Somehow you don't hear any calls for Ukraine to return the parts of Poland that were attached to it by Comrade Stalin either. They've been a part of Ukraine for barely longer than the parts of Russia where the fighting is happening.
Because it was in many ways, the same as a generation before that and one before that.
40+yy ago, HIV was still a death sentence, lung cancer slid to the 3-4th position in CODs caused by cancer. Late 90s saw the introduction of gene therapies. New drugs for diabetes and heart disease came to the market. These aren't small incremental QoL improvements; these advancements saved millions of lives since then.
All this progress should be celebrated, not trivialized
It sounds callous to dismiss any improvement to medicine as trivial, but frankly I grew up under the assumption that humanity would cure diabetes, cancer, blindness, deafness and perhaps death itself by the end of the millennium.
It's much more noteworthy to me how little medicine has changed than how much.
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
>treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
This is oft-repeated but it doesn’t pass the smell test. All it takes is a single principled academic to blow the whistle if there was any active suppression of cures or even research on cures.
In order for that quip to hold water, literally everyone involved in medical research would have to be a corrupt monster maintaining a worldwide conspiracy to keep sick people coming back for more treatments.
I guess I grew up in 'then', and that sort of 'assumption' is so depressing. But I get that some people only want to see medicine, and by extension science, as black-and-white.
"We haven't cured diabetes" (only made massive strides in control and management and came up with whole new classes of drugs that attack root causes). "We haven't cured cancer" (except the ones we have cured, the ones we came up with vaccines to prevent (HPV), and came up with all sorts of innovative and less unpleasant treatments extending lifespan with less side effects), "Haven't cured blindness or deafness" (except for the types we have cured).
And haven't cured death...well, I guess you got us there.
But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
I agree with you that we’ve made progress. To me, the most impressive achievement has been nearly curing cystic fibrosis and our array of tools for dealing with HIV. And yet I think it’s important to be honest. The age-adjusted diabetes mortality rate per 100k has been pretty much flat for thirty years. Life expectancy growth has been meager and the US has fallen far behind Europe. Overall health/physical fitness/mental health seems to be on a steep decline. 90s and 2000s optimists had high hopes for the world. They would have good reason to be horrified at things today.
If we’re lagging behind Europe, that doesn’t seem to be an issue of progress, right? If they are ahead, then the tech must be here ready. And we’re a bit richer than them, so we could presumably afford to implement whatever policies they are doing. Living just seems to be a higher priority over there…
Meh, it’s just a reflection of there not actually being much medical progress and lifestyle becoming the dominant tie breaker as the few breakthroughs we do have spread through the world.
“We can’t fix most damage to any organ so follow a lifestyle that minimizes it” is not a meaningful medical advance IMO.
>But, yeah, it's low hanging fruit from the anti-science playbook to focus on what hasn't been done, and pretend that means nothing has been done.
Good comment until here. This is a strawman.
There is a huge gap between the vision of what medical advances might have brought us with technological breakthroughs and what has actually materialized.
Cloning and stem cell research was supposed to let me grab a new organ whenever I needed it. Instead I’m still waiting for a poor person to get in a car wreck and be declared brain dead so they can scoop out whatever is useful.
Cancer is still killing half of my family members, just different kinds after a cancer breakthrough helped them with an earlier kind. Others are hit by strokes, heart failures, and the occasional horrific Alzheimer’s.
50 years I’ve heard doctors saying “it was just their time” as an excuse for some old person dying. The field barely has a grasp on human biology and we’re barely making inroads.
I was also very excited about it and that's why I immediately upgraded to Android 16. But it turns out that it is not part of this update. The same with the new Material design, it doesn't come with Android 16 update. So weird that they announced both of these features as if they are part of Android 16.
I also think it's a very poor choice of words. If Sovietization meant introducing inefficiencies and bureaucracy in the egg supply chain, this is not even remotely what the article claims is going on here: the eggs producers are very intentionally (rather than incompetently or bureaucratically) throttling the egg production because it's more profitable to produce less
If the authors meant monopolization of the egg supply, well, that's also pretty far from being uniquely a Soviet phenomenon.
It was a really dumb thing to bring up and it chips away at the authors' credibility.
What else would you blame? The air pollution ramped up with China opening up to capital markets. China has fewer social programs than Canada and many more powerful private companies than EU. Calling China communist doesn't make it any more true than me calling myself the Queen of England.
I think you can destroy the environment with industrialization using different distributive glosses. The Soviet Union did it with a very diminished sense of private property and limited internal markets. I think sometimes it is capitalist ignoring of externalities and other times it is socialist ignoring of externalities.
The soviet union most likely did what it did because it was totalitarian, not because it was socialist. A dictator can choose to pollute a river, but that’s kinda besides the point. The point is that the incentives that capitalism creates for individuals’ behavior will tend to drive them to produce without consideration for externalities. Even a dictatorship may arguably have more incentives against such, cause the dictator needs to avoid pissing off the people so much that they overthrow him. Capitalism instead explicitly accepts most behaviors which pursue profit regardless of their externalities. To the extent we don’t do that today, it’s mostly the result of changing our economy to be a more mixed model with government regulation.
I bought a Beelink Ser6Max (7735hs) model on my trip to China in 2023. I'm using it for a NAS (a mini PC + a 4-bay DAS) I couldn't be more happier. My watt meter says the box sips 13-15W when idle in stark contrast to my desktop "oven" which usually goes up 250-300W even without GPUs.
I loaded it with 64GB of RAM and a 4TB nvme (out of which I use 1 for a zfs cache for my DAS) running Ubuntu (no proxmos).
It's running 20-40 containers behind a nginx instance and I didn't run into perf issues yet.
It really is a set-and-forget little machine.
The only slightly annoying thing is that there's only one thunderbolt port and it's being used by the DAS. For some reason, the DAS doesn't work on a USB3.1.
Otherwise, I'd love to plug eGPU in and use for simpler AI tasks such as CV in immich and RAGs on some repos.
If you don't need a web UI, I'd strongly recommend rclone (https://rclone.org/) that can layer e2e encryption over many and I mean MANY cloud storage providers!
It runs on Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android.
Finally, it has some nifty features as "union" which combines multiple backends into a single directory view.
Nuclear and chemical weapons, artillery were invented by West. The US remains (hopefully continues so) the only country that used the nuclear weapons against another country. All defunct European powers routinely engaged in slave trade, drug trade, ethnic cleansing (in very inventive ways sometimes as the Americans nearly exterminating the entire bison population which was the main food source for Native Peoples).
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