Indeed, it's amazing how far the KMT has swayed to be CCP-friendly over the past 30+ years. I have the distinct impression that there are two causes: first, it has been infiltrated by spies and traitors, and second, it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to oppose DPP positions. The more the ruling party supports the notion of a separate Taiwanese identity from the mainland, the more the KMT wants to cozy up to the CCP.

There is absolutely zero question that xiaohongshu is a vehicle for CCP-backed propaganda and disinformation. To look at how social media networks in general have so effectively shaped global political discourse through the dissemination of false narratives and bad faith arguments disguised as grassroots communication, and continue to think that these networks operate independently or neutrally, is profoundly naive. Twitter accidentally exposed numerous foreign accounts posing as American influencers. We already knew this to be the case, but to actually see confirmation demonstrates that this is not isolated behavior. It is ridiculous to think that governments around the world--including the largest, most monolithic, panoptic system as the CCP--are not leveraging xiaohongshu and other networks to their benefit.

The two are not mutually exclusive and it is not a zero-sum game. In fact, the two things--greater domestic wealth for the working class, and a strong foreign policy--historically have been demonstrably causally correlated. Again, as I have alluded to in my previous post, the postwar American economy was extremely prosperous. The pressure to maintain military superiority against the emergent superpower of the USSR resulted in an expansion of domestic infrastructure and technological research. The idea of American corporations outsourcing labor to foreign countries was anathema to this philosophy of American self-reliance that was born from fears of being infiltrated by Communists--remember the McCarthy era, the Cuban missile crisis, the space race, the Vietnam and Korean Wars? That strong military, that projection of power, and building of alliances, is what has made the United States the dominant economic superpower it has been for the last 80 years, and for about half of that time, that wealth was shared with the working class.

What changed was that in a world in which the specter of external threats being diminished--the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, the rise of cheap foreign labor in US-friendly countries became irresistible to US companies seeking cheaper labor costs. Jobs were outsourced, manufacturing died, and the owners of capital paid off politicians to pass legislation to deregulate and accelerate this process. Skilled foreign workers were brought in under the pretense of a lack of equivalent domestic expertise, and these immigrants are effectively indentured to these companies, further distorting the value of domestic labor and increasing wealth inequality.

And now, the result of this decades-long dismantling of the American labor market, with the American public being increasingly poorly educated, addicted to social media propaganda, unaware and unwilling to learn about a history that has been concealed from them, you have people completely unable to undertstand what is going on with this current administration and those who have been pulling the strings all this time. Americans are being robbed blind by the very people that they are voting for with cultish fervor, while the rest of the democratic world is looking on in horror.

Correct. People have a very short memory, and viewing current affairs through such a limited lens makes one susceptible to disinformation.

The whole reason why Eastern European countries and former republics of the USSR have consistently turned toward the EU after the collapse of the Soviet Union is because the people could see how decades of Russian corruption left them with nothing. They were fed up with being satellite states without any right to self-determination, kept poor and servile while the Russian elite flourished.

That said, the EU is certainly not without its flaws. But as a model for shared governance and security, every member country (except for the UK) understands that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Prior to Trump's ascendancy, Brexit was the most successful disinformation campaign we have seen coming from Russia since the Cold War, and we continue to see the stoking of populist propaganda from nations that seek to break Western alliances, because it has worked so well and for such little investment.

You're not wrong, but the blame is perhaps misdirected, because domestic affairs are not necessarily downstream effects of foreign economic and military policy.

My personal opinion is that the US military industrial complex has less to do with the depressed economic conditions of rural America than the corporate oligarchs who have exploited outsourced cheap foreign labor to extract more profit.

In the aftermath of WWII, there were many industry towns that experienced massive economic growth because of government investment into technologies that sought to maintain a strategic advantage in a postwar, US-dominated global economy. To maintain energy security, places like West Virginia mined more coal and Texas pumped more oil. Domestic manufacturing experienced a boom. But in peactime, increasing globalization of the labor market drove the outsourcing of labor as described above, and killed these towns. A generation of Americans who believed they were entitled to good jobs with minimal education were left in the dust.

Even now, with renewable energy initiatives, these same people still want to risk their lives and health to mine coal. They are stuck in a past that no longer exists.

And when you compare against Europe, you can see that a lot of the grievances that so many Americans (very much rightfully) have--fair labor practices, less wealth inequality, more worker rights, a living wage--are policies that those same Americans have consistently voted against by electing representatives that are bought by corporations. That's not just a failure of accountability, it's a failure of education and resistance against propaganda.

That austerity is coming to Europe is actually more of a symptom of the worldwide cancer of the capitalist class that relentlessly continues to seek ways to extract profit from the working class. They see social programs--money that hardworking taxpayers have paid--as their next target to raid, and drunk off their success in the US, are seeking to do the same elsewhere.

What is not said enough about this post-WWII security arrangement in which the US plays a large role in transatlantic defense, is that this is not simply just a "cost" that the US absorbs. The US has profited ENORMOUSLY off of this arrangement, in multiple ways.

First of all, much of the defense spending goes back into the American economy. Second, the US gets to sell weapons to its allies around the world. Third, the US gets tremendous soft power and influence to shape foreign governments' policies in ways that are friendly to US interests. Those things, put together, are why the US has maintained its dominant role in global geopolitics and economy since WWII.

And Trump/MAGA are incapable of understanding this. They are only interested in the short term reward of extortion for their own personal gain and ego. They've already killed the goose that lays the golden egg.

America's economic and military allies have realized that the US is no longer a reliable partner. This is not just about Europe feeling resentful that they have to pay for their own defense. It is a grim understanding that US idiocracy has destroyed all trust. That loss of trust is NOT coming back--not for many generations. That's why there is so much diplomatic manuvering going on between Western non-US countries to strengthen existing ties. By then, the consequences of the myopically self-centered isolationist beliefs of US conservatives will have relegated the US to a bit player on the world stage, incapable of influencing global politics, as other countries (e.g. China) fill in the power vacuum.

The reason why the US has so willingly invested so much into NATO and into defense in general, is because they have, by far, reaped the greatest rewards.

It isn't a thing in the US, unfortunately.

New buildings might have it integrated into their HVAC systems, and older construction might have it retrofitted, but the vast, vast majority of buildings in the US do not have CO2 monitoring. We have CO (monoxide) detectors, but that's an entirely different issue.

Another consideration is that for assessment of infectious disease risk, measurement of CO2 in indoor communal spaces needs to be distributed throughout, as opposed to having a single point of measurement that might only reflect the average air quality for HVAC control purposes. It's the same principle with temperature; multi-room dwellings such as offices will typically have thermostats distributed throughout the building to control each zone. When employees gather in a conference room and close the door, the CO2 level can skyrocket, easily hitting 1800 ppm without ventilation. I believe that CO2 concentrations should be as easy to access as temperature, and that the public could be educated about its meaning.

Regarding VOC versus CO2 monitoring, they both have their use cases, and which one is a more suitable to measure depends on what we are really wanting to know. VOC sensors will detect a wide array of compounds, but not all of them are indicative of human occupancy, whereas CO2 concentration is the direct product of respiratory activity (unless non-biological sources of CO2 are present, such as dry ice). So if we are interested in transmissibility of airborne diseases, I would pick CO2, since you could measure high VOC levels in the air of an unoccupied storage shed or basement that otherwise has virtually no risk of infectious disease. But if we wanted to measure if the air is clean and fresh--i.e., relatively free of pollutants, I pick VOC monitoring over CO2. Both are important because they are meaningful proxies for health risks, but they are proxies for different types of risk.

If they think it's safe, then they should be the first to demonstrate it first hand, using their own bodies.

The issue with PFAS is not necessarily direct product-to-human exposure. The whole problem with this class of molecules is that they are extremely long-lived in the environment, due to their chemical structure. Their persistence is what causes bioaccumulation in ecosystems and food chains. Sure, the farmers might wash off the residue before delivering them to the market, but where does the effluent go? And if the EPA further relaxes the reporting standards, what is the most economically efficient path these agribusinesses will take with respect to these waste products?

So consider the industrial-scale usage of persistent pesticides without adequate reporting and oversight. It'll kill off insect populations (because that's exactly what they are designed to do), which then disrupts the ecosystem. Animals that feed off of these insects will accumulate these chemicals. Fish and amphibians will accumulate them because they're swimming in the polluted water. The whole food web gets tainted.

There is no escaping the conclusion that this decision is based in corruption and absolutely will pollute the environment and kill/injure people.

True, but measurement is the first step to understanding. Moreover, it is not a foregone conclusion that a building is poorly ventilated or requires costly modification. Quantification is evidence, and evidence is empowerment, and empowerment leads to change. This is how modern epidemiology came into existence, and modern architecture ought to consider CO2 measurement as an integral component of indoor air quality and occupant comfort.

In the past, we did not have a germ theory of disease. People lived amongst open sewers and walked through human and animal waste on the street. We did not have clean municipal water delivery systems. And at the time, the idea that these were problems that needed to be fixed was considered preposterous, heretical, foolish. But to our credit, we have mostly fixed these problems. The global COVID pandemic should have taught us that there is still more to be done with respect to protecting public health. I hope that in the near future, humans will look back on how we live today and think that our attitudes toward communicable diseases is as primitive, barbaric, and disgusting as how we look back on how people lived hundreds of years ago.

For ages, we have had thermostats to tell us the ambient room temperature, and to adjust HVAC settings accordingly. And more recently, they've gone smart--letting us see and control it automatically, or manually with a smartphone interface.

Why not also have this technology for measuring CO2? The sensors are not expensive, they don't need a lot of power, and they are low maintenance. CO2 is a reasonably good proxy for indoor air quality with respect to environments occupied by humans. And you don't need to modify the existing architecture or install ductwork.

While there's a lot of justified cynicism about antibiotic overuse and resistance, in the case of TB, the main driver of resistance isn't misuse, overuse, or noncompliance. It has to do with several factors: the nature of the infection; the transmissibility of disease; incomplete efficacy of gold standard treatments; and the disproportionate prevalence of disease in developing countries where public health and sanitation standards are lower. In other words, when it comes to TB, it's not because people are casually being prescribed and taking the newest antibiotics, or that farmers are using them prophylactically in livestock. Antibiotics for TB--specifically, the ones for drug-resistant TB--are not some walk in the park. A person does not simply get these handed to them like candy.

While the photo was taken by her assistant, the fact is that it was Franklin's expertise in X-ray crystallography that resulted in a superior level of image quality. Her contribution is deservedly significant because if she had not used such techniques to precisely control the humidity of the imaging chamber, the images Gosling took would not have had the resolution they did.

To say that it was Gosling's photo, thus implying that he--of anyone at Kings College--should have received some measure of credit for the discovery, is a misrepresentation in the sense that a lab assistant whose responsibility is to operate machinery is not necessarily the one who devised the method or protocol of operation, nor the technological innovation that enables the research. No one who has worked in the applied sciences can deny this truth.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

If you want to use AI, fine. But if I don't want to use it, don't force it on me. Don't put it in my OS and make me have to jump through hoops to avoid it. Don't put it in my applications and have it automatically steal all of my original work to use as training data.

A reasonable person would understand that when these companies take these kinds of actions and put the onus on the end user to opt out, that this is highly suggestive of unethical motives. Normalization through market saturation and removal of choice is a core tenet of the enshittification playbook. And if you, as the consumer, don't fight against this, you will quickly find yourself paying money for what used to be free; putting up with planned obsolescence; not being able to buy durable or reliable products; and becoming inured to vendor lock-in, intrusive advertising, and privacy violations.

The question is not whether generative AI technology is "useful," "trustworthy," "ethical," or "valuable." There are valid use cases, and to argue against that is a losing proposition. Rather, the issue is about the behavior and motives of the entities that have commodified them. Conversely, people defending the use of AI because of its utility are missing the point: you do not need to attack those who choose to avoid it (and in doing so, implicitly defend the unethical behavior of the companies that are pushing it on everyone) as the price for being able to benefit from it.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues, the concern I have is that this product seems to be positioned as a medical device, but lacks any information about how it is measuring what it purports to measure. What studies support the analyses it claims to perform, and how are its methodologies validated?

It's deeply deceptive to sell a product that claims to track health-related data without disclosing how accurate or meaningful it is. Not only is such marketing exploiting the uneducated public and leading them to believe in snake oil, it also creates confusion, sows distrust of legitimate medical devices and therapies, and may actually lead consumers to make incorrect decisions about seeking medical advice. For instance, one can reasonably envision that someone who buys this product could believe that it could justify less frequent colonoscopies. That could be a fatal error.

What you describe is essentially a form of bootstrapping, which is a legitimate statistical method. However, there are important limitations that cannot be overlooked.

First, the constructed data are still being created from real data. Ethics is not just about preserving patient privacy, although that is a very important aspect. It's also about taking into consideration how the data will be used. Does the patient consent to this use, and if they are unable to consent, how should this be taken into consideration? Medical science has not had a stellar track record with respect to ethical human experimentation (e.g., Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee syphilis study, MKUltra--and that's just in recent US history). There is a documented history of patient collected data being used in ways that those patients never even conceived, let alone anticipated or consented. Caution must be exercised whenever any such data is used, even indirectly.

Second, this kind of simulated data is problematic to analyze from a statistical perspective, and any biostatistician should be aware of this: there is no such thing as a free lunch. The problem of missing data--in actual patients!--is itself difficult to address, since methods to deal with missingness invariably rely on various strong assumptions about the nature of that missingness. So to make inferences on data that is entirely simulated is, at the very least, as problematic as analyzing partially missing data.

Third, the current state of LLMs, and their demonstrated tendency to distort or invent features from noise (which is arguably the primary mechanism by which they operate), is such that any inferences from LLM-generated data would be questionable and should not be considered statistically meaningful. It could be used for hypothesis generation, but it would not satisfy any kind of statistical review.

It all comes back to what I said in another comment: you can't have it both ways. If you can draw some statistically meaningful conclusion from the data, then that data came from real-world patients and must pass ethical review. If you don't need ethical review because the data didn't come from any real patient, then any inferences are dubious at best, and are most likely just fabrications that cannot pass confirmatory analysis.

The purported claim is that "because the AI-generated data do not include data from actual humans, they do not need ethics review to use."

But if the data only represent actual patients in a "statistical" sense (whatever that means), how can the research be CERTAIN that it has captured appropriate signals or effects that are observed in such data? And I say this as a statistician who has over a decade of experience in statistical analysis of clinical trials.

There is a fundamental principle at work here, one that researchers cannot take the better part of both ways of the argument: any meaningful inference must be drawn on real world data, and if such data is taken from humans, it must pass an ethics board review. If one argues that AI-generated data doesn't need the latter because it is a fabrication, then it doesn't meet the standard for meaningful inference. If one argues that it does meet the standard, then no matter how the data was transformed from real-world patient sources, it requires ethics board review.

In biostatistics, we use models to analyze data to detect potential effects, draw hypotheses or make predictions, and test those hypotheses to make probabilistic statements--i.e., statistical inferences--about the validity of those hypotheses. This is done within a framework that obeys mathematical truth, so that as long as certain assumptions about the data are met, the results are meaningful. But what "statistically naive" people consistently fail to appreciate, especially in their frenzy to "leverage" AI everywhere, is that those assumptions are PRETTY FUCKING IMPORTANT and using an LLM to generate "new" data from existing, real-world data, is like making repeated photocopies of an original--placing one model on top of another model. LLMs will invent signals where none originally existed. LLMs will fail to capture signals where one actually existed.