I know you are using the definition of tyrant here to be "unjust ruler" as opposed to "absolute ruler". You can certainly have benevolent tyrants but I would argue that, without a constitution, you are by definition ruled by a tyrant. The USA has the oldest ratified constitution so that is a prime candidate for being considered the oldest stable non-tyrannical government. Of course, we are using different definitions of tyrant so you will not agree with my conclusion.
While I agree to some extent with your point, I think your definition is far too strict. For example, by your definition, the UK is currently and has always been a tyranny, since they don't have a formal constitution in the sense of any US-style state.
However, I do think you're generally right - even under a more relaxed definition of what does or doesn't constitute a tyranny, the USA is clearly one of the first non-tyrannical states, at least among those that still exist today. The UK had a mostly-democratic ruling system for even longer than that.
On the other hand, if we define tyranny to refer to any state in which elections are restricted to a relatively small subset of the population, then the USA or UK are not that early. Voting in the USA was largely restricted to male property owners until 1840. Many other countries had adopted at least universal male voting by this time. The UK was even later to pass this standard.
While you are being downvoted, this is actually an astute observation. However, your point is working against you in this case. If the vaccine was actually deadly, the unvaccinated individuals who survived the pandemic would be having better health outcomes. This is not what they found. If they included the pandemic in this study, the deaths by COVID would be much worse in the unvaccinated group.
Looking at Table 2 and as the name suggests, COVID is included in "all-cause" mortality. Your statement does not follow because it could have made COVID outcomes better yet "all-other" causes worse for a neutral "no increase in all-cause". If you look at Table 2, you can see that the vaccinated group is less mortality in all diseases. That being said, as much as I think this is over-stated, this is very much a correlation thing because we all know that unvaccinated individuals live their lives differently compared to vaccinated individuals. Even accounting for similar statistics, the one group is prone to higher death rates not because they are unvaccinated but because of the reason they are unvaccinated.
> After standardizing the characteristics of vaccinated individuals to those of unvaccinated individuals, we observed a 25% lower standardized incidence of all-cause death in vaccinated individuals compared with unvaccinated ones…
> Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
> All-cause mortality was lower within 6 months following COVID-19 vaccination, regardless of the dose administered, compared with the control periods...
If COVID vaccines reduces COVID deaths by 100% and increase everything else by 0.01%, you will still have a reduction in "all-cause" mortality yet your chances of dying by anything else has increased. I already said Table 2 does not show this is happening and in fact vaccinated individuals have better outcomes across the board. However, people are drawing this conclusion (even though they are correct) incorrectly without looking at the data.
GP is saying that indicates there is some other factor involved in reducing all-cause mortality, since it is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases, and that therefore the sampling of these populations is not random.
> It is probably reasonable to believe the mRNA vaccines were not improving mortality rates of other diseases,
By now, this is not a reasonable belief. We know that COVID can cause cardiovascular damage, kidney injury, diabetes, neurological problems, and systemic inflammation, all of which increase mortality risk from other causes. It only makes sense that preventing or reducing the severity of COVID infection prevents those downstream complications and reduces all-cause mortality.
Not the OP. I think what they are driving at is that if knowledge is discovered during exploration in cohort A, cohort B can exploit it. Then, the whole A/B test breaks down to which cohort got to benefit more from the bandit learnings.
Yes, this is exactly the kind of scenario I was alluding to.
For example, cohorts with very light traffic are likely to get undue benefit as a lot of exploration might be done before the smaller cohort needs to select an arm, so things are closer to convergence.
Another example is if there are wildly different outcomes between cohorts. More of the exploration will be done in cohorts with more traffic, leading bandit optimizations to fit large cohorts better than lower traffic cohorts.
Even if you do manage to make things independent, you have to wait for bandit convergence before you know what converged results will look like. That requires being able to measure convergence, which isn't always easy, especially if you don't know to do that before designing the system.
With all of these problems, we kept bandits, and even expanded their application. At least for the 10 years I was still around. They are incredibly powerful. But there was a lot of "I wish those damned bandits didn't work so well!"
For anyone who is not aware, A/B tests assume cohorts behave independently of each other. The less true that is, the less reliable the results are. This was even worse for us in parts of our system where there were no bandits, but there was direct interactions between individuals.
Mostly because it’s a lot of fun to get in one room and play together. They’ve pretty consistently said that they’re not even sure that it’s a net benefit for winning.
At a very high level, revenues enter your bank account and expenses leave your bank account. In this case, you are getting confused about the taxes. There is employee compensation (which the business will withhold taxes on behalf of the individual) and then payroll taxes (which the employee is not responsible for). In essence, "their taxes" is not the correct classification. The business pays the employee (and facilitates the tax collection) and also pays the tax the business owes.
> I’m currently going through an identity crisis (as a gearhead) as a result of this.
I would challenge you that it is your proclivity for logic that is causing your identity crisis. If you enjoy a certain aesthetic, the pursuit of that aesthetic is reason enough. You are already putting constraints on the concept of a car because strapping a rocket on wheels with wings is going to have much more performance than an EV. Redefine your pursuit to be the most performant muscle car and everything is squared. No identity crisis needed.
I’m morphing love of modifying cars away from performance numbers but into a way to build mechanical art and enjoy emotional moments with other humans.
I’ve realized that was the whole point all along. EV or IC it doesn’t matter. Just the statements above
If you are Boeing or Northrup Grumman, etc. most of your focus is on the coming decades. A huge part of your budget is getting governments to sign procurement deals that are 20 years out. They know that will guarantee revenues 40 years out.
Boeing's string of disasters over the last couple of years isn't so much a concern for its short-term health as it is for Boeing's ability to land any long-term payouts. They hire people today to deliver a product twelve years from now. If there is no prospect for twelve years from now they start caving in today. You just don't see the dust cloud for a few years.
Except the reason people say decades is that's how long military procurement programs run for. Companies have order books past 2035 for many systems and standing up new programs takes time.
You start making yourself look unreliable now, then you prompt a transition away and by the time it's underway there's no reason to switch back anyway - i.e. traditionally stable companies "suddenly" are having trouble finding sales.
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