I have no reason to defend BMGF and enjoy a good comeuppance probably more than the next person, but the article you linked to about the issues in India is far from the smoking gun in the hands BMGF you seem to think it is.
From the article: an already-approved vaccine (by FDA and others) was given to children via a trial run by an NGO (PATH) and was funded by BMGF. The trial was apparently run unethically, and in addition a year or so later it was found that girls administered the vaccine had possibly experienced adverse events, some very serious.
(Based on the article alone) it’s very likely that BMGF would have been totally hands off in overseeing the trial, and would certainly have had strict agreements with PATH. If there were indeed ethical breaches, I’m sure BMGF was very unhappy about this. Moreover, while we of course shouldn’t ignore the safety findings, attributing events causally to the vaccination against the standard background rate of events in a particular population is rife with uncertainty.
And of course, the trial potentially being unethically run doesn’t make the (already- and still-approved) vaccine more dangerous… but does make it easier to whip up sensation and clicks for articles, especially if there’s a big rich US Foundation also tangentially involved.
And why are the clinical trials of unproven drugs by American megacorporations being done on poor illiterate tribals in India and Africa, rather than on American citizens first?
Don't want your children to die or be affected due to such experimental drugs, do you? Show me where clinical trials of this HPV vaccine has been done on minors in USA.
But you feel it is okay if some healthy children in some poor or developing nation die due to such unethical BioPharma experiments, especially when those experiments are done WITHOUT consent from the children and their parents?!!
"A standing committee on health and family welfare that investigated the irregularities pertaining to the observation studies in India tabled its report.
The committee found that consent for conducting these studies, in many cases, was taken from the hostel wardens, which was a flagrant violation of norms. In many other cases, thumbprint impressions of their poor and illiterate parents were duly affixed onto the consent form. The children also had no idea about the nature of the disease or the vaccine. The authorities concerned could not furnish requisite consent forms for the vaccinated children in a huge number of cases.
The standing committee report was a shocker but it became even more significant when it was mentioned that the study was sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
When a team of health activists - from an NGO (Sama) that specializes in women’s health - visited on a fact-finding mission, they were told that as many as 120 girls vaccinated with HPV had experienced adverse reactions such as epileptic seizures, severe stomach ache, headaches and mood swings. The Sama report also said there had been cases of early onset of menstruation following the vaccination, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps among many students. The standing committee pulled up the relevant state governments for the shoddy investigation into these deaths. It said it was disturbed to find that “all the seven deaths were summarily dismissed as unrelated to vaccinations without in-depth investigations…the speculative causes were suicides, accidental drowning in well (why not suicide?), malaria, viral infections, subarachnoid hemorrhage (without autopsy) etc.”
The committee said that in the context of deaths of girls classified as suicide, the role of the “HPV vaccine as a possible, if not probable, cause of suicidal ideation cannot be ruled out.”
> A large portion, maybe even the majority, of travelers simply won't feel safe without it. I've had and overheard multiple conversations at the airport where somebody felt uncomfortable boarding a plane because they saw the screening agent asleep at the desk.
I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.
Anyway, such major population-wide measures shouldn’t be about stopping people being “uncomfortable” - they should be about minimising risk, or not at all. If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.
> I’d hazard that this may be true now, but this feeling was created by the same “security measures” we’re discussing.
Slight tangent but I recall travelling within the Schengen Zone for the first time and just walking off the plane and straight into a taxi. When I explained what I did to someone she asked "but what about security? How do they know you've not got a bomb?" I don't think I had the words to explain that, if I did manage to sneak a bomb onto the plane into Madrid, I was probably not going to save it for the airport after I landed...
I think they're talking about international travel and not having to go through border control within the Schengen space even though you're traveling to different countries.
Yes, but border control isn't security. I don't go through security when I arrive in the US either. (I do have global entry but that just means I usually go through immigration faster.) If I have a connecting flight after arriving in the US I do sometimes have to go through security again with my carryon but that's a function of airport layout.
Just to be clear: I understand the difference. What I couldn’t do was explain to someone who has no concept that customs are not a security check. Or that you don’t need customs for (effectively) internal flights. I suspect part of this is that in the UK, we don’t get many internal flights (beyond connections), so people don’t have an experience of just walking off a plane and out of the airport.
I flew once from Iraq to Sweden (in a private capacity). There was zero controls other than stamping the passport, passport control but no customs inspection. No check of bags and no question of what I might have been doing in Iraq or why I would go from there to Sweden. It was shocking. Just welcome to sweden and off to the street.
Hopefully they haven't changed. It's nice to see a place still left without the paranoia.
Border entry at airports is concerned with a) smuggling and b) immigration control. Passport control may have been all you saw but there was almost certainly heavy profiling and background checking going on behind the scenes. If you had matched a more suspicious pattern than "high-power passport without suspicious history flying an unusual route", you likely would have faced more scrutiny.
> If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.
I mean, yes, quite an apt description of our reality. This has basically been the modus operandi of the whole of American society for the last 3 decades.
Can't have your kids riding bikes in the neighborhood. Can't build something on your own property yourself without 3 rounds of permitting and environmental review. Can't have roads that are too narrow for a 1100 horsepower ladder truck. Can't get onto a plane without going through a jobs program. Can't cut hair without a certificate. Can't teach 6 year olds without 3 years of post grad schooling + debt. Can't have plants in a waiting room because they might catch on fire. Can't have a comfortable bench because someone who looks like shit might sleep on it.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider how you would organise your ideal society.
I lived in Switzerland for a time and there are many notorious rules (e.g. don't shower or flush your toilet after 10pm; don't recycle glass out of working hours) governing day-to-day behaviour which initially seem ridiculous and intrusive. However, what you quickly realise is that many of these are rooted in a simple cultural approach of "live your life as you wish, just don't make other people's life worse" - an approach I came to appreciate.
I’m loving the huge uptick in coverage that Linux is getting recently, from the stories about switching from Windows, to the huge leaps made to support gaming.
I’m now hoping that this will gradually push the big publishers to go the extra mile and figure out their anti-cheat stuff on Linux too, so the remaining big games can make the transition.
1. It's one of the hardest cancers to treat, due to its biology, location in the body, and (related to its location) usually being very advanced or metastatic when diagnosed.
2. Mice =/= humans, as noted.
However we're heading into a new era of treatments for some cancers including pancreatic. New agents targeting RAS/KRAS pathways will likely deliver the first meaningful treatment advances in decades.
Daraxonrasib (which was used in the linked study) is leading the charge, but there are multiple other drugs (including agents that are a little more targeted, and therefore likely slightly better tolerated, like pan-KRAS or KRAS G12D inhibitors) in development too.
Here are the three simultanious things targeted in this experment.
Triple inhibition strategy
Pancreatic cancer remains notoriously difficult to treat, with very poor survival rates and limited effective therapies. The new research aims to combat this by targeting RAF1, EGFR family receptors and STAT3 signalling – nodes that are crucial for tumour growth and survival.
Hah, the joys of optimising your morning commute on the Underground.
“If I stand here on the platform, then the door will open right in front of me, and I’ll be exactly at the exit of the next platform where I need to change…”
Yeah or “the signs all say to walk down this long passage, and then back via a circuitous route for flow control, but my destination is actually 100 feet away through this unmarked passage so I’ll just go that way” situation at Bank
I have similar suspicions. I have a decent but not spectacular company Thinkpad. When I first got it, it was super-fast; it didn’t matter that sleep very quickly turned into an automatic shutdown, as it booted in mere seconds.
Gradually, over the past 9 or so months, it’s just become progressively worse and worse in a range of ways. It might be Windows updates, but the magnitude makes me suspect it’s layer upon layer of corporate management and security nonsense.
Not the OP, but I’ve had success starting with a blank app created by Xcode with the appropriate language/frameworks (ie something that will already run but does nothing). You then ask Claude to start from that point.
The only issue I’ve had is sometimes Xcode not ‘seeing’ new files that Claude has created along the way, and needing to add these manually into the Xcode project. (A Google around suggests this shouldn’t happen if you create the project in the right way, and yet it still sometimes does.)
Not OP and this is mere anecdata, but on a modest several-years-old ThinkPad, Zotero was slow when my single collection started pushing over 1,000 papers, most of which had PDFs attached. Starting up would take many seconds (half a minute?) and heavy operations such as bulk-renaming would take minutes. But for day-to-day use (adding references to my collection via a browser plugin) it was fine.
Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary.
On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.
From the article: an already-approved vaccine (by FDA and others) was given to children via a trial run by an NGO (PATH) and was funded by BMGF. The trial was apparently run unethically, and in addition a year or so later it was found that girls administered the vaccine had possibly experienced adverse events, some very serious.
(Based on the article alone) it’s very likely that BMGF would have been totally hands off in overseeing the trial, and would certainly have had strict agreements with PATH. If there were indeed ethical breaches, I’m sure BMGF was very unhappy about this. Moreover, while we of course shouldn’t ignore the safety findings, attributing events causally to the vaccination against the standard background rate of events in a particular population is rife with uncertainty.
And of course, the trial potentially being unethically run doesn’t make the (already- and still-approved) vaccine more dangerous… but does make it easier to whip up sensation and clicks for articles, especially if there’s a big rich US Foundation also tangentially involved.
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