The standard pandemic-preparedness playbook “has failed catastrophically,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and NIH Principal Deputy Director Matthew J. Memoli wrote in City Journal

I’ll offer this in response, which the author failed to note:

Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” They’ve been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.

Resizable as in file size. PDF quality is easily adjustable when saved.

I didn’t say the potential capabilities weren’t impressive. Creating interesting things from text prompts is impressive. I do not find it profound.

Why did you just say what I said while initially contradicting me yet ignore the valid ctiticisms?

No. I simply find them easy to use. Maybe it’s because familiarity, but I see nothing inherently difficult with saving a document as PDF, and making them form-fills with the right software isn’t too hard. When someone is sent a contract or something they tend to be used to looking at what they would see on paper, PDFs tend to be what they’re used to and very basic WYSIWYG, so people don’t have to think too hard about it.

“Profoundly impressive”?

I find nothing profound about it at all. It’s a devastating resource hog, it’s wrong a lot of the time, it’s manipulated by its owners to deliver the messages they want or avoid inconveniencing them, it lends itself to the further stupidification of humans who are too lazy to fact check(that’s almost everyone), it’s used to make video lies in the face of objective truth and sexually humiliate women.

Honestly, fuck AI.

Why it couldn’t be strictly deployed as a backup to human skill such as looking for cancer, trying to formulate better drugs, etc. instead of the invasive garbage it is being used to get rid of humans.

I must be the odd one. I find PDFs easy to use, convenient, easy to edit, and manageable. The business world relies quite a bit on PDF. The whole point of PDFs is that they can easily be printed, signed, be fillable forms, or stored as a single file where the size can be adjusted to fit storage requirements. The only issue I have with them is so many editors all want money for the ability to edit them whereas other document formats have software like LibreOffice that are free. I get you’re probably good at markdown, but the rest of the business world that relies on PDFs and can barely handle them or open a web browser. Their brains would melt if they couldn’t simply open or print a single file.

Somehow they imagine themselves the hero, but they’re the contributors to the dystopia they create. Like the evil dictators that somehow can’t understand how twisted the world is they created.

They know the price of guns.

There’s enough spineless tools and right wingnuts, just like ICE, that would be happy to pull the trigger.

Their version of Utopia is more like the movie Elysium. A separate paradise for them, the Dregs for the rest of humanity.

Baking isn’t as restrictive as most people think it is, you can do quite a bit. However, it’s a lot shorter path to failure and creating an inedible gummy mess vs maybe oversalting a steak a little.

Thinking is too shallow when it comes to this. Yes, there is absolutely the direct results: starvation, death, and malnutrition.

And for whatever reason people seem ok with that to save US $ and force the other country to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.

The shallow thinking avoids the indirect issues. The starvation leads to instability. The instability can cause war and fighting on a local level that can damage US interests and trade. It can spill over into neighboring countries causing the same issues. Increase radicalization and terrorism. They’ll blame the “West”, likely justifiably, for supporting some dictator that steps in to crush opposition yet protect the West’s interests in whatever resource they’re stripping from the country or ag product like chocolate they’re making people grind at growing and underpaying for. It could have the country(ies) switch allegiances to competitors like China. All of this can directly increase costs to the US or indirectly to the US via regional instability disrupting trade. That’s ok, they’ll just pass the cost on to consumers while business profits are protected. It beats spending any tax money on things.

This is typical reductionist and oversimplified thinking by the Right. Just punish people into changing behavior, nevermind the indirect costs.

They probably mostly voted for Trump too. But yeah, the rich guy gets the article.

I think the biggest complaint was trying to shove cortana and the 11 upgrade in everyone’s faces constantly. Once you use whatever fix you choose to remove or silence them, Win10 is fine - as long as you avoid installing other M$ services, but those aren’t 10’s fault. And disabling the few annoyances 10 has are paltry compared to what M$ is trying to force users into accepting in 11.

Holy drama.

That group of men who were probably gay yet had turbulent relations with women.

Roy Cohn had several girlfriends and apparently thought about proposing to Barbara Walters. Everything points to him being gay. He was a bullying, brilliant sociopath. Helped out significantly with McCarthyism.

Trump. Just seems to use women, talks trashy about them, but can’t seem to have a decent relationship with a single one. Narcissistic sociopath, definitely not brilliant. Anti-socialist at least.

Possibly John Wayne. Beat the crap out of women, with several relationships and wives. Loved hanging out with men (John Ford and his buddies) Rabid anti-communist, also supporting McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Wonder how many other men were internally and externally destructive thanks to being forced into society’s mold in conflict with who they really were.

Ba dum-tss

Ok, so what is ultra-processed food and how did they come up with the term?

How they came up with it:

The term “ultra-processed foods” originated from the Nova food classification system, which defines food in four categories, ranging from least to most processed:

• Unprocessed or minimally processed foods like fruit, vegetables, milk, or fish.
• Processed culinary ingredients like salt, sugar, olive oil, and butter.
• Processed foods, such as jam, pickles, or canned fruit.
• Ultra-processed foods, like energy drinks, instant oatmeal, sliced bread, or hot dogs.

Ultra-processed foods have one or more ingredient that wouldn’t be found in a kitchen, like chemical-based preservatives, emulsifiers like hydrogenated oils, sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, and artificial colors and flavors. UPFs undergo processing techniques like pre-frying, molding, extrusion, fractioning, and other chemical alterations that leave the final products bearing almost no resemblance to the original ingredients.

What it is:

Ultra-processed food and drinks

Ultra-processed foods – which can be foods and drinks – are not really foods but formulations of substances obtained by fractionating foods from the first group. These substances include sugar, oils, and fats for domestic use, protein isolates or concentrates, interesterified oils, hydrogenated fat, modified starches, and various substances for exclusive industrial use.

Added colors, flavors, emulsifiers, thickeners, and other additives that give the formulations sensory properties similar to those found in foods from the first group are added into ultra-processed foods. They also serve to disguise undesired characteristics of the final product. Despite the claims commonly seen on the packaging of ultra-processed products, unprocessed foods are just a small percentage of their composition or are simply absent, as in the case of “strawberry flavored” or “grape flavored” products.

…

Ultra-processed foods include soft drinks, dairy drinks, fruit nectar, powdered mixes for making fruit-flavored drinks, ‘packaged snacks’, sweets and chocolates, cereal bars, ice cream, packaged bread and other bakery products, margarine and other butter substitutes, biscuits, cakes and cake mixes, morning cereals, pies, pasta dishes and pre-prepared pizzas, chicken and fish nuggets, sausages, hamburgers and other reconstituted meat products, instant noodles, powdered mixtures for preparing soups or desserts and many other products.

“I’m gonna take you all down with me!”

Then I’ll ask for a sweet socialist bailout while the rest of you enjoy rugged capitalism.