and if you want to see it take 'not a full-blown bill' get an amendment passed. there are legislative avenues. what can be enabled by fiat can be disabled by fiat.

you want to expand the role and powers of the executive. pass an amendment and formalize it. i don't think pseudo-laws in the form of executive agency regulations are good, i'll vote for people against them, and you do the same, and we'll see how my people are convinced one way or the other.

nah, i get the feeling that maybe the legal environment has changed, or they got better precedent now/better lawyers. I mean, i get the feeling that big tech gets away with a shit-ton these days that wouldn't have flied in the past.

fair enough we should go full libertarian, we should also let drug addicts OD with no efforts at resuscitation. And suicide prevention is literally counter-productive to the end goal.

taking that a step further. release all lockdowns. If you can't protect yourself from covid adequately, it's on you for catching it. I'm not sure it was government's place to lockdown in the first place, considering the one responsible for your protection was you. I was masking in march when the CDC was saying n95's weren't effective for the general populace, only for frontline workers.

i'm sure many more people would say the same for people with your personality.

surgical masks were never for protecting you, they were for protecting others.

n95s were for protecting you.

masking works, we've essentially skipped a flu season. i'd say, as long as people are cognizant that when they're out and about in areas with strangers, they just mask up to not infect others we should be on a downward trajectory.

whatever miniscule reduction in spread that mandatory masking has accomplished is, i strongly believe, overwhelmingly miniscule compared to the mandatory shutdowns that were attendant.

in february, my estimate was a million dead in the US alone, based on the numbers. We're not close, not because of mandatory masking, but i think because i underestimated the impact of 'fear' on behavior, as well as underestimated the willingness of the people to tolerate damage to the economy. I believe we would have seen the slow down if we simply mandated masks for like 2 weeks, to get the point across that it was serious, then rolled back all mandates.

The entity most responsible for my personal safety is me, not the government. I been masking since early march, and i only stopped masking as rigorously around my co-workers when they started masking rigorously.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN on Feb. 16 that there had been a vaccine distribution plan but a “rather vague” plan on “getting the vaccine doses into people’s arms.”

“Getting the vaccines made, getting them shipped through Operation Warp Speed was okay,” Fauci said. “But I believe what the vice president is referring to is what is the process of actually getting these doses into people. That is something that we had to get much better organized now with getting the community vaccine centers, getting the pharmacies involved, getting mobile units involved.”"

factcheck.org somewhere.

fundamentally different approaches to the role of federal government. Operation warpspeed was about getting the vaccine rolling, and out to the states, and essentially providing any support the states might require to distribute to the people.

Presumably a more democratic approach to the entire thing would be federal coordination from DC into the arm of every american, bypassing state level government entirely.

Some people like it that the federal government ceded covid responses to the duly elected governors. I mean, I seem to remember news coverage over how sexually desireable Cuomo's news conferences made him seem to journalists... you know if you have the capacity to ignore the 'choking-to-death in their own fluids' of nursing home patients.

The point being, warp speed was not about getting the shot into each american arm, it was about getting sufficient shots into each governor's hand... which they still fell short of.

don't criticize them for incompetence over a philosophical difference in governance. There's plenty of other incompetence to criticize for, this is not one.

um, from what i understand, it runs on meatware... and you should come with the compiler preinstalled. try loading it into a different port, that might work.

i assume from your post, that you live an ascetic life, and that you give away all your profits except for what you need to live right now right this instant. if not, you're a hypocrite.

i find it curious that you seem to believe that health-care is a right. anything that involves the labor of others is necessarily not a right. It's the moral thing to do to help one another, but you no more deserve a cheap pill, than you deserve to have a harem.

innovation is driven by greed, desperation and curiosity.

lets talk about a hypothetical drug for a hypothetical disease. lets exclude the people that will research the drug for passion/altruism. They'll do it regardless of private vs public. The people who are desperate for a cure, same business. They'll do it regardless. How about the people who are good enough, smart enough but just go where the money is? the apathetic talent? how are you going to capture those people/entities?

reminds me of the phrase, 'they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work'

of a sampling of vaccine approvals by the FDA between 2010 and 2020, the median approval time was 8 years.

do you actually think fauci deserves credit? do you believe biden deserves credit?

so, you're suggesting that the only thing that Trump administration did was gaurantee a market and essentially pre-pay for supply, and reduce regulation by the FDA for approval from 8 years to less than 1.

Yes, the private market did the heavy lifting. Of the public partners, only the trump administration really did anything worth mentioning...

they're [2.54 centimeters)ing closer you mean.

i'm looking at the numbers. from this website

2018, per capita US spending 10k US 5k comparable other country.

drug spending was roughly 1.4k US per capita, and 900 Other.

more or less comparable percentages of over health care spending. Even if you "bargained" for it on single payer to the comparable level, you'd be reducing overall health-care spending by 5 percent. while also removing a major driver in pharmaceutical development.

kill marketing and i think we'll see pharma prices fall.

woops, just went back and RTFA. anyway, they had already more or less eliminated the wet-market....they ruled it out because they couldn't find any traces of the virus in any of the wet market animals...

we pulled out of the WHO after we realized what a massive shit they took on this entire situation.

they tentatively declared the possibility of human to human transmission.

two days later China locked down a city of 11 million people.

yeah, they both knew something they weren't willing to share with anyone else.

if what you quoted is true, well fuck my life. that's actually enough to push me from 'lab release of samples' to 'major fuck-up on an unprecedented scale'