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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago

The world’s 125 poorest countries (2.5b people) have received zero covid vaccine doses to date. The 85 poorest countries project vaccination in 2023/24. This is vaccine apartheid.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/21/wait-your-turn/#vaccine-apartheid

It’s not that poor countries can’t make their own vaccines. The Global South has a lot of vaccine production capacity. The problem is Big Pharma, which refuses to transfer the patents and know-how to repurpose those facilities for mRNA production.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IhL-aGt5dEOVegy4eksgs4T6vDl6L6NbY_YJdvDonBI/edit#gid=0

South Africa and India have petitioned the WTO for a vaccine waiver. We should all want this: first, because it is monstrous to doom millions to die in order to preserve the regulatory privileges of a handful of hugely profitable, heavily subsidized pharma companies.

But second, even if you don’t care about being monstrous, a waiver is needed to ensure all our survival: the longer and wider the virus circulates, the more mutations we’ll get, with the mounting risk of a more virulent, more lethal, more vaccine-resistant strain.

The pharma industry has an army of high-paid lobbyists (including Howard Dean), and volunteer simps (like Bill Gates) who are pushing the story that a waiver is unfair and counterproductive, a betrayal of the fundamental patent bargain.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/15/how-to-rob-a-bank/#roll-the-dice

They say that the pharma companies committed their capital to vaccine research because we, the people of the world, had promised them exclusive rights to those discoveries (notwithstanding that we also paid for the vast majority of that R&D).

If we alter the deal now, how can pharma trust us next time?

Of all the lies told by the pharma industry about the pandemic, this is the most insidious. Because that’s not how the global patent system works at all.

Gen Xers and their elders will remember the summer of 1999 and the Battle of Seattle, where anti-globalization activists fought for weeks to block the signing of the WTO agreement and its chapter on IP, the TRIPS agreement.

The WTO agreement fundamentally changed the way global patents worked.

Prior to the WTO, it was common for poor countries to completely ignore the patents issued by rich countries (unless the World Bank or a former colonial power coerced them into recognizing these claims).

That’s because countries that are net importers of finished goods have no reason to honor their suppliers’ claims — doing so merely burdens their own struggling manufacturers by forcing them to pay rent to rich foreigners.

This creates drag on local development, ensuring that importer countries stay importers, never becoming self-sufficient.

Ignoring other countries’ exclusive rights regimes — copyright, patent, trademark, etc — is a tried-and-true method to gain self-sufficiency.

That’s why the Framers of the US Constitution decided that America would ignore foreign patents and copyrights, a policy that persisted for over a century, only ending once the US became a net exporter of ideas and inventions, and thus stood to gain more than it lost.

Not just the US, of course. Many European nations spent a century or two a-pirating while their developed their capacity. The Dutch, for example, abolished patents during much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

It doesn’t make sense for a poor country to pay a rich country for rent on ideas. At least, it doesn’t make sense from the perspective of the poor countries.

It’s easy to see what rich countries get out of the deal.

That’s where the WTO (and specifically TRIPS) came in.

TRIPS proposed a bargain to poor countries: if you pay rent on rich countries’ ideas (by recognizing their patents, trademarks and copyrights), we’ll engineer the system so that you become the favored manufacturing contractors for rich countries.

This creates jobs in the short term, and, long term, it builds capacity, by teaching people how to build and operate complex systems.

It’s a form of “technology transfer” that replaces the old adversarial system of rent-collectors and tenant states with global cooperation.

This was a dubious proposition, but the WTO threw in a sweetener: a provision for emergengy waivers. These meant that if there was ever a situation where honoring foreign patents would result in domestic mass-death, those offshore obligations would be immediately suspended.

Think about that for a second. The pharma industry wants you to think that a vaccine waiver reneges on the bargain the world made with it.

But that was never the bargain.

The bargain the Global South struck was, “We will pay rent on rich countries’ ideas. In exchange, we’ll get capacity-building help. In case of emergency, all bets are off: not only will we get access to ideas for free, the WTO will use its might to force tech transfer.”

That’s the bargain pharma signed up for. The claim that a waiver reneges on the deal is truly Orwellian, a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition where poor countries pay rent on ideas and get NOTHING in return — save death and the option to pay yet more rent.

“The TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver Proposal: Creating the Right Incentives in Patent Law and Politics to end the COVID-19 Pandemic” is a preprint of an LSE Legal Studies Working Paper by a group of Anglo-Irish legal and poli sci scholars.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3851737

First published yesterday, it delves into a detailed account of this dynamic, and opens with a devastating argument:

If the pharma companies are right and poor countries truly don’t have the capacity to build vaccine factories, then the WTO is a failure.

The whole point was to build capacity.

If it’s not there, then all the rents the poor world paid all century were a lethally squandered opportunity — they should have followed in the footsteps of America and the Netherlands and ignored the rent demanded by wealthy lands.

The authors describe how pharma gamed the system in the WTO decades. For example, companies devote enormous energy to patenting small variations on their processes and products, allowing them to extend the life of their patents long beyond the 20 years they’re promised.

This produces some genuinely hideous outcomes. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s EMPIRE OF PAIN, the author documents how the Sackler family contemplated seeking regulatory approval to prescribe Oxycontin to children in order to extend the life of their patents.

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/patrick-radden-keefe-empire-of-pain-interview/amp

It’s hard to imagine how we’ll survive the pandemic crisis without a waiver. COVAX, the “voluntary” system that lets billionaires, corporations and rich countries offer vaccine doses to poor countries as charity, is a total disaster.

COVAX has only raised pledges of 20% of the needed doses — and it isn’t delivering on those pledges.

The system isn’t just failing by accident — the pharma companies are actively sabotaging it.

C-TAP, the WTO’s own scheme for pooling vaccine production know-how, has failed, largely because companies like Pfizer and Biontech have forced NDAs on their contractors that prevent them from participating in the program.

https://contracts.justia.com/companies/maravai-lifesciences-holdings-inc-11469/contract/137780/

The pharma companies have refused to license for mRNA vaccines for production in both in the rich world (Canada, Israel and Denmark) and the poor world (Bangladesh).

The deals pharma struck with the global south don’t just bump the world’s poorest to the back of the line — they also charge the poorest people the highest prices for vaccines. Astrazeneca is charging South Africa twice the going rate in the EU.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/22/south-africa-paying-more-than-double-eu-price-for-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine

This price-gouging is papered over with misleading claims of charity — for example, Moderna says it won’t extract profit from Brazilians Fiocruz until the pandemic ends — but the agreement allows Moderna to declare the pandemic over in July.

https://www.ft.com/content/c474f9e1-8807-4e57-9c79-6f4af145b68671O

Pharma’s claims of acting in the public interest are pure fantasy.

Pfizer says it makes a 20% profit by selling vaccines it makes for $3/dose at $19.50/dose (“the pandemic price”) — and promises that this price will go up to $175/dose for boosters.

https://s21.q4cdn.com/317678438/files/doc_financials/2020/q4/PFE-USQ_Transcript_2021-02-02.pdf

The very idea of pharma patents is surprisingly new. France instituted pharma patents in 1960; Ireland, 1964; Germany, 1968; Japan, 1976. Pharma demanded these patents to produce the “incentive” to invest, but the bulk of basic pharma R&D is still publicly funded.

Take the Astrazeneca vaccine, developed at Oxford. Between 97.1 and 99% of the funding for that research came from public sources, not Astrazeneca’s profits.

https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.08.21255103

The WTO agreement promised the Global South that in a global pandemic, the same might that was used to coerce them into passing laws enforcing rich countries’ patents would be brought to bear on rich countries to force them to help make medicine where it’s needed.

The pharma shills who claim that waiving the patents on mRNA vaccines actually have a point: pharma companies have gamed the patent system so that much of the know-how is never disclosed in patent filings, and the filings themselves are sealed for 18 months.

In the face of this sabotage, the WTO could order rich member states to uphold their obligations by forcing their companies to transfer patents AND trade secrets to poor countries — just as the US forced pharma companies to pool their research on pennicillin during WWII.

That would be the fair thing to do. The right thing to do. The rational thing to do — if we want to ensure the continuation of our civilization and even our species in the face of new mutant strains.

The WTO claimed that poor countries that honored the TRIPS would become tech exporters, building their own domestic capacity. Twenty years later, they’re still importers — and on track to stay that way forever (or until we’re all killed by covid).

The US has no standing to complain about a TRIPS waver. A country that built its fortune and capacity by refusing to pay rent to rich nations for their ideas deserves the same treatment once it becomes rich itself.

#pluralistic

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flicky1984 · 5 years

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The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games

Flicky (September 1984)

Maze games were very popular during the first half of the 1980s. Hits like Pac-Man had made large sums of money for Sega’s rivals, and though the video arcade industry was no longer moving at the same speed it had during its early years, the genre was still popular enough that publishers kept up a steady rhythm of releases. Sega looked to its R&D division to come up with something that could keep pace with Namco and Bally/Midway. What it got was a little blue bird named Flicky.

Flicky’s development team was led by Youji Ishii, a Sega designer who would one day be responsible for the classic game Fantasy Zone. Having joined Sega in April 1978 after graduating with a degree in electrical engineering, Ishii was interested in creating games that were bright and colorful, and he believed that his works should be happy experiences for players. He started working on sound effects for games like Deep Scan and Zaxxon and got his first chance at design with 1983’s Up’n Down, a pseudo–3D arcade driving game. It sold enough for Sega to assign him to another title, one that was likely more important to Ishii’s career as it was to his employer’s bottom line. Sega meant for Flicky to be its response to Namco’s Mappy, emulating the time-based maze dynamic that was popular at the time. The visual style and gameplay Ishii had in mind would give Sega the competitor it wanted (Derboo, “Flicky”; “Fantasy Zone—2014”).

Flicky put players in the role of a blue sparrow who must rescue her chick friends, called Chirps (In Japan, they were called “Piopio,” a misspelling of the Japanese word “pyopyo” which means “baby bird”). The chicks had run amok inside an apartment building, and Flicky had to gather them all and guide them to the exit. Hungry cats called “Tiger” in the Western version and “Nyannyan” in Japanese actively chased the chicks, as did an iguana named Iggy (Choro in Japan). Touching the chicks put them in line behind Flicky, who had to avoid enemies while bringing all the chicks to the door. Items such as cups and trumpets were scattered throughout the stages, and Flicky could shoot these items at the cats and iguana to temporarily incapacitate them. The Nyannyan couldn’t hurt the baby birds, but they could kill Flicky with a single touch. The game lasted 48 stages before looping with a harder difficulty (Derboo, “Flicky”).

Ishii’s adorable character designs were brought to life by the talented hand of Yoshiki Kawasaki, a young artist who had joined the company because it was the closest job offer to his home. He had been a big fan of pinball and driving games, playing in the dark arcades of Hibiya, Japan, so the chance to join Sega was an exciting opportunity for him. Kawasaki was hired at Sega in 1976 as a designer. Though he was an artist, he started out in the purchasing department, and he spent many an hour playing Head-On. His work soon came to the attention of Hideki Sato, who recognized his talent and moved him over to the visual design division of Sega’s research and development department. His first assignment was the SG-1000 version of Golgo 13. After working on the laserdisc game Albegas and another release called Sinbad Mystery, Kawasaki began to long for something more interesting. He got his chance when he was handed the proposal for Flicky from the game’s lead designer. Kawasaki would finally have his big chance to put his programming abilities to greater use (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

When Kawasaki was assigned to Flicky, all that existed was a simple four-page proposal. There was to be a labyrinth and a simple game character. The concept was just a derivation of Namco’s Pac-Man, where players would collect dots in the maze. Ishii liked maze games, and he knew he wanted the game to follow that motif. He was certain of one thing: Flicky would not penalize players for falling through the floors as Mappy did. This was the starting design premise for the game and the reason why a bird was chosen as the main character (“Fantasy Zone—2014”). The problem was that nothing was detailed; there wasn’t even a description of the game’s background. The character profiles were also incredibly vague, reading “since the maze can be simple lines, the characters can look simple too. You can leave the background black.” Kawasaki based the main character, Flicky, on a lyric from a popular 1977 song called “Densen Ondo,” which referred to three sparrows on an electric line. Kawasaki wondered why birds would move on electric lines when they could simply fly. He figured that perhaps they jumped, so he decided to have Flicky jump (or “heroically jump,” as he put it) instead of fly. The Chirps were an evolution of the dots in the maze. Kawasaki revealed how he developed the little birds in an interview for Sega of Japan’s website:

The dots were originally really just dots. When you collected one it would disappear. But then, I thought it would be interesting if the dots didn’t disappear but instead line up. So, I made the dots line up behind Flicky. That’s when I really started fleshing things out. I asked if I could make the dots 8 × 8 pixels big, but in the end, I couldn’t do anything with 8 × 8 pixels. Then I thought: If they were little birds, I could do it [“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”].

At first, he simply had the Chirps follow their bird friend back to the exit door. That was too simple, so he had them scatter when touched by a cat. When it proved too easy to gather up all the Chirps, Kawasaki spiced things up by having some of them race off in different directions. He gave these “Bad Chirps” sunglasses so that players would be able to recognize them (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Creating those cute little chicks with attitude wasn’t very easy; none of the character models were. Kawasaki had to use a rudimentary tool that was similar to Sega’s TV Oekaki, a tablet-like device that came with a light pen. It plugged directly into televisions and was made available commercially for Sega’s SG-1000 in 1985. Using such a simple tool was problematic, particularly getting it to draw single pixels. It would often draw three or four at once (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Kawasaki’s original level design had horizontal lines on the screen that resembled power lines. These lines were to act as the maze walls; however, once Flicky’s characters were completed, Kawasaki found the lines to be dull and unengaging. It was only after gazing out the window at an apartment building across the street from his third-floor window in Sega’s R&D annex building that Kawasaki found the perfect setting. Why not have the action take place in an apartment building? The residential setting let Kawasaki insert household items, like cups and baby bottles—things that would be found in a home with children. They would also help Flicky fight off Tiger and Iggy (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”).

Flicky played differently than most games of its type, most notably in the way the main character jumped. The control was very floaty and heavy with inertia. Players had to time their jumps correctly, particularly when coming down from the top of the screen. Ishii believed this was the product of the hardware limitations of the System 1 arcade board. These restrictions also influenced the design of the labyrinth stages, which did a decent job of creating the illusion of size. Ishii commented about this challenge in a 2014 interview with STG Gameside. “With Flicky, we challenged ourselves to make the stages feel like wide, expansive spaces despite the tiny memory available” (“Fantasy Zone–2014”).

Ishii was also able to make Flicky seem larger than it really was using free-scrolling stages. Players could move either left or right almost indefinitely, giving the stages a larger sense of scale. The inspiration for this design came from two sources: Williams Electronics’ 1981 smash Defender and a far-lesser known Commodore 64 title named Drol, which involved a flying and shooting robot. “Basically,” Ishii explained to Shooting Gameside in 2014, “I just like that style. I like how you can rush forward, then turn around really quick and retreat if you need to.” Ishii would revisit this design for his 1986 hit, Fantasy Zone (“Fantasy Zone—2014; Ishii).

The stages themselves weren’t random scenery. There was an overall theme to them that was very close to the team, particularly Kawasaki. As the gameplay centered on the concept of saving children, Kawasaki’s group wanted this objective to be Flicky’s driving theme. It wasn’t just about bringing some birds to a door for points; there was more to it than that. Kawasaki wanted players to feel the maternal instinct of protecting defenseless children from predators. He felt they could sympathize, even though the chicks were merely game characters on a screen. After all, Flicky was a sparrow, not a chicken, and while she was only the chicks’ friend and not their mother (despite being labeled as such in the SG-1000 port of the game) she could still want to protect them. “Children face a variety of dangers when they go outside,” he commented in a 2016 interview, “and the feeling of ‘wanting to return them safely to the nest’ is something that I think is experienced 80 The Sega Arcade Revolution by not just parents, but anyone who is around children. And it’s that emotion that drives Flicky, a sparrow, to protect the chicks, even though their parents are actually chickens.” Examples of this design are present throughout the game. The bicycle and balloons (which symbolize dreams) on the title screen, the apartment resident in the bonus stage windows—all were meant to drive the point home that the chicks were children who were in mortal danger. The later stages developed this narrative. For example, the outer space background represented the future, one that would be cut short if Tiger and Iggy got their way. Such themes were not uncommon to games made by Kawasaki. None of his games featured characters dying, and he preferred to make friendlier and cuter games to counteract the bad reputation arcades had in Japan at the time (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak).

In development for a year, Flicky could have been much larger than it finally was. The design team had around 100 stages done but few backgrounds, and there was very little memory space left. Kawasaki opted to keep only four backgrounds, differentiating them by color, and the stages were reduced to a total of 40. After playtesting the game, the team added a monster that would appear in windows and breathe fire. Iggy was also conceived at this point, primarily to keep players from standing still in a stage. He ran throughout the level, making it unsafe to remain too long in a single spot. Kawasaki wasn’t too fond of the lizard because he was added at the end of development. He had wanted Iggy to be an insect, but his lack of motivation for the character made the design look more reptilian. During Flicky’s development, Kawasaki developed something of a reputation for taking such shortcuts, a behavior that earned him the humorous nickname “Sabori Kawasaki,” or “Slacker Kawasaki” (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”)

Flicky changed names twice during development. The original title of Busty was switched to Flippy due to a trademark issue in the U.S. (Bally/Midway also noted that “busty” was American slang for women with large breasts). The next choice, Flippy, was eventually deemed to sound too much like Mappy, so the title was changed again (“Interview: Yoshiki Kawasaki”; Szczepaniak). The game—with its final title of Flicky—was released in Japan in May 1984 and worldwide that September. A decent seller, it would sadly never receive a sequel. Ports of Flicky were released on multiple home consoles and later in compilations, and Flicky herself has made several cameos in other Sega games but has otherwise been forgotten as a character. The closest she’s come to fame has been in Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series as one of the animals released when Sonic defeated Eggman and cleared a zone. All the bird friends that Sonic rescues are called “flickies” and resemble her (“Flicky”).

While it’s unfortunate that Flicky has not been given a second chance, the original game remains an important step for both Ishii and Sega. Much of what Ishii learned from making Flicky would manifest itself in a major way in his masterpiece Fantasy Zone only two years later. His experience with Flicky would also be influential in his later work on other platformers like Teddy Boy Blues (both arcade and Master System versions) and Ristar (Genesis). Sega, on the other hand, got a solid maze-chase game that provided valuable experience to someone who would become one of its most talented and prolific producers. Ishii was part of a major pool of talent that would explode over the next few years, soaring to incredible heights on the wings of a little blue bird.

#history #interview #flicky #sega #arcade

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azspot · 5 years

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He gets a job working R&D for Procter & Gamble. For the next 16 years, he’s an engineer in Ohio. He develops the process for cooking Pringles potato crisps. He thickens around the middle. He and Rosemary have four children. He starts losing his hair. He writes in his spare time, but for years he struggles to publish. There’s a paperback press, Gold Medal Books, that will pay $2,000 for a science fiction novel, and he thinks it would be nice to make that much money for a book, but Gold Medal Books doesn’t like his manuscript. Magazine after magazine turns down his short stories. No one wants his work.

#scifi

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uniquejobs · 1 year

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Ford Hiring R & D Engineers | B.E Mechanical & Electrical Engineers

Introduction Ford Hiring R & D Engineers : FORD has Published notification for the vacancy of R & D Engineers The educational qualification required to apply for this Ford Hiring R & D Engineers is B.E.Mechanical & Electrical Engineers Interested and eligible candidates can apply for Ford Hiring R & D Engineers. There is enough time to apply for any job. Read Ford Hiring date, last date to…

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#ford company job vacancy in chennai #ford company job vacancy in maraimalai nagar #Ford Hiring R & D Engineers #ford india pvt ltd job vacancy #ford job #ford recruitment process #ford vacancy for freshers 2021 #ford vacancy for freshers in chennai

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jobsine · 3 years

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R & D Engineer

Company: Paradise Placement ConsultancyExperience: 0 to 1location: IndiaRef: 24377858Summary: Job Description : Job Description: Requirement of R & D Engineer-Male in Aurangabad. Education: BE / ME (Electronics & Telecommunication/ Electrical) Experience: 0-1 year Responsibility : 1. Conducts research and development…. Apply for the job now! #amp #Engineer

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ritjobvacancy · 3 years

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Dassault Systemes 2022 Hiring Freshers as R&D Development Engineer at Pune

Dassault Systemes Recruitment Drive for 2022 Fresher Dassault Systemes 2022 Hiring Freshers as R&D Development Engineer at Pune About the Company: As part of our Software application development team, you will be involved in challenging and exciting projects, supporting the team in the creation of outstanding enterprise solutions used by major Healthcare, automotive and aerospace customers.…

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#2021 #2022 #B.tech #BE #Dassault Systemes #Fresher #IT Job #ME #MTech #Pune #R&D Development Engineer

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hindustanuniv · 3 years

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Automobile Industry in India

The Automobile industry in India, which includes design, development, manufacturing, repairing and sale of cars, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, as well as trucks, buses and tractors, has witnessed an upsurge over the last few years and continues to boom even today. While India's automobile industry is one of the largest in the world because of the Top 10 Automobile Engineering Colleges in Chennai, the country was the fourth largest exporter of automobiles in Asia last year. Additionally, as per the Automotive Mission Plan (AMP) 2006-2016, presented by the country's Ministry of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, India is a favourite investment destination for international auto-makers, many of whom have set up manufacturing divisions in the country, opening a whole new vista of job opportunities for engineers.

Choose your Lane as Automobile Engineers

A profusion of opportunities are available to fresh engineers depending on the specialisation of their degrees including mechanical, automobile, production and electrical. Broadly, the field offers a variety of jobs in research and development, manufacturing, design, sales and services and components manufacturing segments.

Research and Development in Automobile Industry

The automotive industry is volume driven and requires a certain critical mass for attracting the much needed investment in R&D and new product design and development. Investments in the R&D segment are imperative for innovations that are crucial for achieving and retaining competitiveness." Thus, increased attention is being paid to research and development in India. The industry is stressing on inventing new products and designs with increased frequency. Automobile Companies are scouting for fresh talent and fresher ideas. Another focus area of growth is product improvement that involves power unit research, emission control, vehicle simulation, and testing and prototype validation.

Generally, engineers with Top LLB Courses in Chennai postgraduate qualification are absorbed into R&D activities in the industry. Speaking about what a job in the R&D segment would ideally entail, Development of new products and improvement of existing products and processes are focus areas in research centres. Automobile segment offers immense scope and flexibility for new entrants. For instance, a trainee engineer on the shop floor may be transferred into sales and services, subject to his potential and aptitude.

Automobile Production

A career in automobile manufacturing usually begins on the shop floor and requires one to manage and supervise it. Plant process improvement is one of the goals of all major competitors in the industry. Supply chain management is another area of interest for job seekers dealing with logistics and optimisation of value chains. One may serve at different levels of the production unit depending on one's academic qualifications and experience. Freshers can be absorbed to work in growing fields such as robotics, supply chain management or operations as per their specialisation and aptitude. On the manufacturing front, one would handle operations such as procurement, material handling and quality control.

#op 10 Automobile Engineering Colleges in Chennai #Top LLB Courses in Chennai

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 years

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#7yrsago Amped: Daniel Wilson's followup to Robopocalypse is a wild ride through the Singularity's civil war

Daniel Wilson's latest novel is Amped, a post-apocalyptic high-tech apocalypse cast in the same mold as his spectacular debut novel, Robopocalypse. Wilson is a roboticist by trade, and he combines his background in science and engineering with a knack for fast-paced narrative.

Amped begins on the day that the Supreme Court rules that "Amps" -- people who've had neurological amplification -- aren't entitled to the same rights as "normal" people. Amps are a motley bunch. The amping program started out as a form of "government cheese" -- a welfare handout for the poorest Americans, to help their ADD kids focus in school, to uplift the kids with fetal alcohol syndrome, to give new, functional limbs to shell-shocked veterans rotting in VA beds. Over the years, the amping program is extended to blind people, people with epilepsy, and other people whose disabilities can be overcome with the right combination of new neurocircuitry and physical prostheses.

But, of course, an amp doesn't correct a disabled person's disability up to the level of an able-bodied person. An amped eye isn't a mere substitute for a 20-20 eye -- it blows right past the limitations of our meat-eyes, adding computational pattern-recognition, digital storage, focus at great and close distances, and senstitivity into spectra denied to us poor baseline humans. Likewise amplified cognition, limbs, and so on.

America -- uncomfortable with questions of race and class at the best of times -- goes insane. Suddenly, the privileged elites of America are physically weaker, intellectually slower, and generally less fit than the teeming underclasses whose badge of shame is a tell-tale data-access port on one temple. Laws demanding "equality" for unenhanced humans chip away at the social contract, and a demagogue senator sees a political opportunity and seizes it. The book opens with a front row seat for the Amp's Kristallnacht, and we watch as Owen Gray, the son of a surgeon famed for his R&D efforts on the amp program, races from tragedy to terror. Gray is a schoolteacher whose epilepsy has been treated with an amp, and the book opens with him climbing out on the school roof to try to talk down a formerly learning-disabled amped girl whose machine-enhanced intellect has told her that she will soon be torn to pieces by jealous classmates, who are riding high on a new court ruling that excludes her from the public school system.

When she jumps to her death, Owen is blamed for it. He races to his father's lab, only to find the old man sitting amid a wreckage left behind by a FBI smash-and-grab raid. The political tide has turned. His father orders him to seek out an old colleague in Iowa, and Owen takes to the road. Quickly, he is embroiled in a civil war. As one of the book's antiheroes puts it:

"Look at us. Amps. We're morons smarter than Lucifer. Cripples stronger than gravity. A bunch of broke-ass motherfuckers stinking rich with potential. This is our army. Our people. Strong and hurt. We're the wounded supermen of tomorrow, Gray. It's time you got yourself healed. New world ain't gonna build itself. And the old world don't want to go without a fight."

Wilson has done a very good job with Amped. It's a lot more allegorical and a lot less scientific than Robopocalypse -- the action more about the drama than any kind of rigorous extrapolation. But Wilson taps into something primal with Amped, some of the deep questions about medical ethics, the social effects of technology, and the way that class and politics make technological questions much harder to resolve.

The folks at Doubleday were good enough to provide the first two chapters for your perusal: Chapter 1, Chapter 2.

Amped

https://boingboing.net/2012/06/07/amped-daniel-wilson.html

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kaispen · 7 years

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Fresh Start, BFFs, the Lunar New Year 2018, My Fourth Take on Meet Me in St. Gallen

February 17, 2018

I’ve found myself smiling more often these days.

It must be from clarifying my principles these days, solidifying the lodestar that leads me to my new life, my fresh start.

I spent the Lunar New Year satisfyingly.

First, I had lunch with a friend, E, who, in the course of our friendship (of more than ten years), had risen to a high-ranking position in the four-thousand student strong university he has worked in for the past twenty years. His salary grade had risen four fold, his influence larger. But he wants to go back to his passion, where the real action is: classroom teaching.

In mid-afternoon, I went uptown to meet a friend whose niece was engaged in a Virtual Assistant online job. Two months from now, I will have been on leave, but will still need to earn a living. F, the niece, accommodated my request. After years, my mind finally accommodated the process of an SEO’s job. Just as we finished, BFF joined me in my friend’s house.

My friend’s elder sister, the lady of the house, held us captive by her animated, passionate storytelling of the mishaps of house construction in an upscale subdivision – the one we were visiting: the price padding of the engineer (a cousin whom she helped finish college), the deplorable paint job, the substandard water closets and lavatories (which looked as large as those in local ship cabins). She reenacted her rage in stage play proportions, it was hard not to follow. If it hadn’t been for the mommy duties of bff, we would have stayed till God knows what time.

At sundown, my best friend dropped me off at the uptown mall where I had my progressive eyeglasses checked. After ten months, my glasses had scratches on its surface, so I asked what my next best option was. Separate reading and distance glasses. Reading glasses were the priority. She had frames on sale, Php900 frame + lens. I told her I’d come back. At the ground floor, I found myself reading glasses worth Php300 and brought those home.

After I checked on my son, my friend, L, and I decided at the spur of the moment to hang out. Movie or whatever. Sin Island, I said. She’d wanted to watch Fifty Shades of Grey to which I was averse. Sin Island has better reviews. It has sex, but the movie sounds more intelligent than the dumbing damning Fifty Shades. In the end, we ended up at the hotel with our friends who had gotten married three days before. We had a riot recalling our maddening party days – how my marriage ended with that famous scuffle at the bar wherein my best friends had their starring roles. L’s crazy seven years with her unfaithful husband. Our bride friend relived her escapades which her husband listened to bemusedly. I had just learned that night that the bride and L had the craziest times (before bff and I joined their group).

A story: So L, and the newly wed bride, R, and their other friend, M, were regulars at the happening club in the early 2000’s. They were popular chicks who didn’t go to clubs to snag guys, but simply to drink and get drunk. They were natural partygoer magnets whose table was always a bus stop of hi’s, hello’s from acquaintances and admirers. One time, a younger guy they named D, a cousin of yet another friend, swung by their table. R & M were busy drinking and eating crispy pata while L just drank and ended up chatting with the new guy, D. Before everyone even knew it, L bit D in the chest! Bewildered, flattered and physically in pain, D showed his bruised chest where L had bit him to R & M.

The next week at ladies’ night, L, M, and R were at the same club again. Shortly after they’d settled down to their table to get drunk, D arrived with his basketball posse. D told his team that the hot girl who had given him his battle scar was sure to be in that place. Boy, was she ready to hump, he told his team smugly.

“So where’s the hot girl who’s so onto you?” asked the leader of their team, a tall, imposing man who was eyeing the area. “Over their, boss,” said D, pointing to my friends’ table.

“Fuck, that’s my sister!”

We all bawled over with laughter!

Yesterday was a refreshingly fun day.

Today was better.

My day started going to bff’s office to accompany her to the hospital, hoping to get her eyes checked by a glaucoma specialist.

While waiting for her to finish a conference with her client, I browsed some business starter articles.

I glowed when she and her client emerged into the receiving area. It turned out she was talking to my high school crush, now an aging heartthrob whose career as a playboy has seen better days.

“That voice!” I gushed when he’d gone out. “My goodness, the original Jerry Yan has aged well!”

At two hospitals, the doctors were not in. We went off to have lunch of greens and fish along the main thoroughfare of our city. Our conversation revolved around my immediate plans while going to one specific topic to another, but always back to my plans.

It felt good talking to a friend who didn’t need much explanation over where I have been in life. And even better that she was supportive without being patronizing. Bff has hardly been patronizing.

“Remember when you already had your son, but I was still single and free? That time when you said I could do anything I wanted? It’s you who’s at that place right now. Fresh start. And I am excited for you.”

Fresh start, she wrote on the restaurant’s place mat using her Pilot Prera Fountain Pen.

In mid afternoon, I introduced her to the blind masseuse I went to for a head and shoulder massage. She had wanted to have a massage the day before, but her husband invited her to go shopping on the mall wide sale. Her headache worried her. I told her to have her eyes checked, thus the decision to go doctor-hunting this morning. But since there were no doctors, she had an almost satisfying appointment with the masseuse. It would have been perfect if not for the lack of minutes or the comfort of her bed at home.

But the day was hardly over.

After I’d dropped by to check on my son, bff and I resumed our day.

Because her husband was going to sleep over at the province, she decided to watch Meet Me in St Gallen with me (my fourth viewing).

I went along with her as she finished her Saturday tasks of closing up her law office for the weekend, releasing the payroll to the men who were working on their house construction (this is why my friend’s sister the day before was even more relevant, because bff and husband were having theirs built, too), and then off to the movies. Along the way, we chatted about many things: her marriage, business, our insecurities, people we knew, loved, hated, our children, our escapades in the past.

“This is a good movie to watch if we were in our twenties,” bff said on the first episode of the movie. “Yeah,” I replied, “this is for people who haven’t tasted the bitterness of heartbreak.”

“Sometimes, he’s gwapo,” she’d say of Carlo Aquino, the leading man, “sometimes, so-so.” “To me, he is sooo gwapo,” I whispered my declaration.

On the second episode, she said, “Celeste is to me, as J is to Jesse.” We squealed quietly as I didn’t see that coming. J is her eternal college crush, Salvador del Mundo’s friend. “My god and my husband is not here tonight!” she fake-grumbled when Jesse pulled Celeste for a kiss.

We would laugh as other viewers would make spot on quips, rude as commenting in movie houses was. Eventually, we subsided into taking in the serious scenes that would tie the movie together.

Towards the end of the movie, after Celeste told Jesse that she had a boyfriend, the two were just walking along the snow covered path, Celeste picked her phone up, and we, the audience were tight chested and in tears, someone from a row above us whispered audibly, “Her boyfriend is dead.” Bff and I stifled our hearty laughs through our heartache and tears.

And then the movie ended.

“Reality kills romance.” That is bff’s famous FB comment concluding what she made up about Sharon and Gabby’s small screen McDo ad, that part 2 of the real/reel life lovers reunion would be computing the latter’s arrears in child support for their daughter KC.

Trust and thank bff for taking us for a smooth landing from Cloud 9.

This is the context to which I analyzed Meet Me in St. Gallen with bff.

It is sheer poetry, the movie, I maintained. It is unrealistic, said bff. Because no one would pull off what Celeste did to Jesse in their first meeting. Yes, it was sassy, I agreed, and people like my younger self, would have wanted to emulate. “You’re a stalker!” But reality is, no self-respecting guy would pursue such a cuckoo, if cute, but cuckoo nonetheless approach from a girl. And in real life, the girl, too, would have had other recourses if she did suspect that the guy was a stalker.

But they were in their early twenties and they were in a film. So, yup, it worked out.

Next, we both agreed that we had grown old and crossed over to the dark side, not agreeing to Celeste and Jesse’s decision of sharing that night four years later. Yes, it happens in real life on a regular basis, but no, we didn’t agree that they had to do it.

Besides, Celeste was too good to be true, holding her sassy tongue when “Mahal’s” name blinked while Jesse’s phone rang. In reality, we would have given Jesse a piece of our mind the morning after. And yes, Celeste would have been capable of that, given her cheeky nature.

But the film showed sheer poetry in the wordless minutes when beautiful body language and eye contact danced to the languid melody of “The Morning After”. Celeste is the humanized ideal version of ourselves. The tragic heroine who cried in silence as her torn lover left her to face the aftermath of that morning after.

Indeed, Celeste made Jesse her ideal man. It is hard to marry the ideal man lest he fall short of her expectations. The farting, the bad odors, irritating habits and unforgivable quirks. Reality kills romance. “Good thing I have low expectations of my husband,” bff declared. “Yes, because either you discard the situation or find a way to live with yourself and him,” I added. “This is why I’m single and ‘Because This is My First Life’ is such a good series.”

“But still, that guy above us wanted to kill Celeste’s boyfriend,” we burst out laughing. “I still want them to end up together,” I’m not sure if I said that aloud of just thought about it (why do you think I watched it a fourth time?).

“As much as critics compare it to the ‘Before’ trilogy, in my opinion, St. Gallen is incomparable. I found the intellectual talk in the ‘Before’ trilogy contrived. Here in St. Gallen, the movie spoke to the audience about things that matter – “

“Yes, it has layers, it has depth.”

“Indeed! It talks about life, about love. About things that matter to people. Destiny, choices,”

“And they are so beautiful, the two of them. And Carlo Aquino looks like J.”

“I want to make an oeuvre as beautiful and magical as that.”

“Make a book out of the love letters sent to you.”

Our conversation turned to Amy Tan’s books. We would have talked into the night if bff’s babies weren’t waiting. It was time to call it a night at nine p.m.

After a lighthearted chat with my son, I said a thanksgiving rosary for the wonderful lunar new year. Fresh start. I’m feeling hopeful.

My lodestar verbalized, on the way to being solidified. I’ll write that in another post, I hope.

I had to write these events down before my bedtime shower. Good night.

#fresh start #meet me in st. gallen #bffs #happy days

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vishers · 5 years

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Notes from Will Larson’s SRECON 2019 Talk: How Stripe Invests in Technical Infrastructure

I really enjoyed this talk (slides here and video here) by Will Larson on how Stripe manages it's investment in infrastructure, even if it did lead me to quip a bit on the t00ts.

My major take aways are:

I appreciated his somewhat short discussion of what infrastructure is. I know that SRE's areas of responsibilites everywhere I've worked have always been nebulous at best. There's some substrate of tech with no clear upper boundary that ceases to be what the app teams want to work on and so become "someone else's problem". That seems to be what most people mean when they talk about infrastructure. DevOps has always been about squelching (thanks, Good Words…) the impulse to treat that substrate as somehow less important than the application code you're writing.

His lovely diagram around the forced/discretionary and short-term/long-term. This is a really concise and clear way to talk about the the kind of work we should want to be doing and the kind of work we may be doing. I think it's especially insightful to point out that don't actually want to be in the bottom right hand corner because you're likely not generating value at that point.

It's also very nice to be clearly reminded of how to 1. Know you're in firefighting mode and 2. A direct and clear strategy to get out of that mode. His 5 step process for that is very useful.

I loved his emphasis on listening to your customers. This is another thing that DevOps/SRE gets so right that so many organizations still struggle with. Direct and constant collaboration between App Engineers and Ops Engineers is critical for the feedback loops to be kept short and for everyone's work to be as efficient as possible.

His strategies for innovation are all really good.

The metaphor of an investment portfolio is intriguing as well. I need to come up with something like that for myself.

I'll definitely be following Will more closely now.

Presentation by Will Larson (@lethain).

Author of An Elegant Puzzle

How do you prioritize investment in infrastructure…

…in a high autonomy enviromnment with…

Companies author has worked in have all had very little top down control and instead have been mostly engineering lead

…within a rapidly scaling business.

How to do useful things without burning out.

What is technical infrastructure? Anything you don't want to own. "Someone's biggest problem they dislike." Tools used by 3 or more teams for business critical workloads.

Outline of the talk:

Fundamentals

Escaping the Firefight

Learning to inovate

Navigating breadth

Unifying approach

Fundamentals

How can the work you're team is doing be understood and broken down?

Forced/Discretionary dichotomy Short-term/Long-term dichotomy

Most teams are solidly in the Forced/Short-term corner currently.

They think they want to be all the way at the bottom right though which is not true. That corner is where a pure R&D team might be which means that ultimately you're working on something that no one is actually using.

Where you want to be:

More discretionary work than forced work but a rough balance between short-term and long-term work with perhaps a slight preference for long-term work.

Firefighting

Evidence you're in the fire:

More time on incidents

Incident impact increases

What's the firefighting strategy?

Reduce WIP

Finish something

Automate (ITIL)

Need to be able to track every incoming request otherwise you don't know where you're spending all your time and thus don't know how to make arguments for what to automate to free up the most time.

Eliminate categories of problems

Surface evidence of progress and if you can't find any, hire.

Don't fall in love with firefighting which can be a great way to for SRE teams to get acclaim. This is subtle but extremely important for a part of the organization that's largely invisible if they're doing their job well.

Innovating

Once you've successfully freed up time through effective firefighting and fire prevention you will probably have an opportunity you've never had before which is to actually pick what you work on next. It's tempting to do what you want to do or what seems most obvious to you to do but that's a mistake.

Instead, you need to listen to your users. They are the ones who know what they need to be better. And they're often shy about telling you, unlike your servers.

Ways innovation goes wrong:

Making the obvious fix

This may help a little but will not eliminate problem categories and likely won't be what your customers actually need because you're by nature of your team divorced from direct usage of your product most of the time.

Fixating on the local maxima

Doing what you're already doing but better often obscures changes that would bring about true leverage alteration.

What to pick out of infinite possibilities?

Order by return on investment Don't try without users in the room Long-term vision

Right opportunity, wrong solution

Validate what you're working on Cheapest possible disproving Try the hardest cases early Embed with the owners

How to innovate

Discover

Benchmark with other companies

Coffee chats with users

SLOs

Customers often don't know how to express what they want. A way around that can be to pick some SLOs to target and see how they react ambiently. If you're knocking your SLOs out of the park but they're still mad then ask them how they'd change the SLOs. If you're failing your SLOs entirely but they don't seem to mind you're also doing something wrong.

Surveys (but minimal and flawed)

Surveys are often a way to get the most angry people to respond to you and are thus fairly narrow and flawed. Use only as a last resort.

If you don't do something valuable you're going to get defunded.

Navigating Breadth

Figure out cyclical things to convert unplanned work to planned work. If you have scaling issues around the same time every year, plan for doing scale testing before then since it shouldn't really be a surprise. This is a technical example of breadth oriented thinking.

What's the organizational fix?

Stripe's infrastructure properties

Security

Reliability

Usability (productivity)

Efficiency

Latency

These are lightly ordered but not stack ranked.

You need to invest in all of it. It's a portfolio.

Establish baseliness in each property which are some goal that you must hit.

Invest until you hit each baseline.

Then think of each of those baselines across time so that you can foresee investments you need to start now so that they don't turn into a firefight later (like the scaling issue from above).

Unifying approach

Investment Strategy

40% user asks

30% platform quality

30% "key initiatives"

#sre #DevOps #talk notes

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ryankelley · 6 years

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I really had high hopes for Trump's economic policy. Early on, I felt we needed some protectionist measures and some gutting of our governments profligate spending--particularly by the DoD. Some good things are happening according to indicators of employment and wages. But honestly, my working-class family is now paying more taxes than before, and I suspect this market growth is largely short-sighted gorging, PR-fueled and wishful thinking. Of course rah-rah nationalism is going to draw some positive speculation and investment, but it's not real growth.

Eventually the chickens will come home to roost. Our R&D funding is decelerating and becoming more centralized. We're trapping more money at the top, increasing inequality, continually squeezing dwindling natural resources without incentivizing environmentally-sustainable technology development. Trickle-down economics has its merits. It's wise to make rich people and business owners comfortable so they store money in your banks and invest more capital your nation. Unfortunately, we haven't done that. We've made them richer at the expense of the working class while they've continued to move their funds overseas into more liberalized nations. We gave their corporations control over markets like airlines, telecommunications, health insurance, bankings--eliminating competition and creating ineffeciencies.

What we should be doing is cutting taxes for the working-class. They actually take their savings and reinvest large portions of it into the local economy--via openning new businesses, purchasing more goods and services etc...One thing the working class does is work--so it makes sense that putting extra money in their pocket will result in extra money being reinvested into the economy.

The working class is the most productive segment of the economy per dollar. Unfortunately, they're already loyal tax payers, so the bureaucrats and crony businesses don't need to focus on them when campaigning. Instead, they offer sops of bread to the poor masses in order to get their policy across. This is why inner cities have stayed poor despite being dominated by leftists over the last 40 years, and why the welfare state is so inefficient. The aim is to pacify their desperation with some small gift in the short term, like a needle exchange or more money into a bad public school. In return, the leftist demagogue gets their vote and passes more policy funneling money into the businesses they're affiliated with. Wall Street loved Hillary, not Trump.

Thus, we've actually squeezed the working class more in recent years. While some tax cuts and some positive PR has led to economic growth and higher wages, it hasn't done so in a sustainable fashion. Furthermore, middle-class homeowners are now enjoying less tax cuts under Trump, the Drug War is now being waged against veterans wrought with chronic pain and health insurance has increasing per capita. Illegal immigration persists, and there's now policy on the ballot proposing that felons and illegal aliens will vote. Meaning, net resource takers will be given more power vis a viz tax-paying citizens. The middle class will effectively pay more for the same amount of public goods they received before under this policy. While this policy comes from the left, I suspect it is here because the left has been inflamed in hysteria over Trump's rhetoric. After all, every action has a reaction. The left is only becoming more radical and desperate with every loss. The cyclical nature of politics and economy leads me to believe the next president will be a democrat.

My ballot was red in Florida, but honestly, I regretted watching Rick Scott shut down sewage treatment plants, pollute the everglades and Tampa Bay, and drill offshore...He traded some short-term growth for long-term economic health--also sacrificed the beauty of the area. This is the typical conservative policy prescription. Keep doing what you're doing until it stops working. Well, it's going to stop working--we're overpopulated, our natural resource stores are quickly dwindling and the earth is telling us we're in trouble with a more extreme climate. Worse, it's economically irrational to trade tourism—e.g. clean beaches--and real estate—e.g. clean water and fertile land--for his friends at the oil companies. Tourism and real estate, most likely, are sectors that have far more growth potential and offer long-term stability in a state like Florida. Jeopardizing these sectors along with commercial fisheries to drill off shore is unlikely to be a net gain.

Unfortunately, I just didn't see any more promising options on the left side of the ballot. Frankly, I'm not surprised. That side has become the anti-science side. They're waging a war against the entire field of economics. They feel bought, and in every policy prescription are attempting to take away our individual freedoms. They want our right to self-defense, they want our free speech, they want our free markets and they want control over our critical goods--safety, telecommunications, water, arable land...Simply put, while the right may be misguided, the left has become dangerous to the citizen's future. I work in STEM, and I worked very hard to get there. I got a degree in economics (hard!) and I have spent the last 6 years working tirelessly as a software engineer (hard!). In response to the high wage I"ve earned while their voters chose easy, liberal arts degrees that have a poor return in the work force, they're forcing policy that funnels STEM jobs away from me and towards less-qualified people because of their race or gender. 51% of the US population is female--the law of supply and demand means my wage will fall if we're hiring less-qualified women just because they're women. And can I speak out? No. They're the party against free speech--they despise so-called "Hate Speech". In essence, they despise any non-polite speech, and therefore, free speech. Their rhetoric increasingly aligns with authoritarian police states that have total control over the populace.

Because they suffered a loss, the left is becoming more tyrannical. Essentially, anyone they can draw votes from they want voting. Most recently, they started pushing policy to allow felons and non-citizens to vote in elections. I saw this on my ballot in Florida. Already, they want illegal aliens sharing public goods despite so many impoverished and homeless US citizens not having enough access to them.

Both sides have become out of touch with our nations' needs. We might've had a few sops of bread under Trump, but ultimately, the inflammatory rhetoric from his regime will undoubtedly lead to a harsh reaction in the opposite direction.

#trump economics government policy politics

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