“So the larger truth here is that machines want information to be free. But of course, it wasn’t just printing and information. The industrial revolution was about powered machines enabling people to produce more and more things more quickly and cheaply, over the last two centuries enabling a remarkable, continual increase in prosperity (and, with luck and political will, social progress). So if information wants to be free, that’s just a particular digital-age instance of machines want everything to be free—including the cost of every kind of work. Machines want to do all the jobs. In this century, as computers and AI become ever more powerful and ever cheaper, we’re seeing machines get ever closer to their goal, so to speak, of doing all the jobs. We’ve already moved from the exurbs to the outskirts of that science fiction destination. So the 64-quadrillion-dollar question now is, what happens after the machines’ mission is accomplished, and most of us are economically redundant? What is the machines’ ultimate goal? Do they want to enrich all of us, or to immiserate most of us? To be our willing slaves or to enslave us? Of course, it isn’t actually up to the machines. It’s up to us.”
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NYTimes: Coronavirus News: Strong Immunity May Follow Even Mild Cases
Even mild Covid-19 cases confer ‘durable immunity,’ new studies find.
Scientists who have been monitoring immune responses to the coronavirus for months are now starting to see encouraging signs of strong, lasting immunity, even in people that developed only mild symptoms of Covid-19, a flurry of new studies has found.
Disease-fighting antibodies, as well as immune cells called B cells and T cells capable of recognizing the virus, appear to persist months after infections have resolved — an encouraging echo of the body’s robust immune response to other viruses.
“This is exactly what you would hope for,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington and an author on one of the new studies, which is currently under review at the journal Nature. “All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response.”
“This is very promising,” said Smita Iyer, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, who is studying immune responses to the coronavirus in rhesus macaques and was not involved in these papers. “This calls for some optimism about herd immunity, and potentially a vaccine.”
Research on the coronavirus is proceeding so quickly, and in such volume, that the traditional review process often cannot keep pace. For the studies discussed here — as with un-peer-reviewed studies in general — The Times arranged for several experts to read and evaluate them.
Although researchers cannot forecast how long these immune responses will last, many experts consider the data a welcome indication that the body has a good chance of fending off the coronavirus if exposed to it again.
“Things are really working as they’re supposed to,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona and an author on one of the new studies, which has not yet been peer reviewed.
Protection against reinfection cannot be fully confirmed until there is proof that most people who encounter the virus a second time are actually able to keep it at bay, Dr. Pepper said. But the findings could help quell recent concerns over the virus’s ability to dupe the immune system into amnesia, leaving people vulnerable to repeat bouts of disease.
Interesting quote from “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History”
“We pay the highest skilled-labor wages in the world. If we would open up our borders to skilled labor far more than we do, we would…suppress the wage levels of the skilled….If we bring in a number of workers to suppress the level of wages [of the skilled] relative to the lesser-skilled, we will reduce the degree of inequality. —”
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Paul Fanlund: On race, a reminder that Madison is two cities | Paul Fanlund | madison.com
NYTimes: Coronavirus Live Updates: Firm Helping Run Federal Database Refuses Senators’ Questions
The manager of the Trump administration’s new virus database refuses Senate questioning, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
The private health care technology vendor that is helping to manage the Trump administration’s new coronavirus database has refused to answer questions from top Senate Democrats about its $10.2 million contract, saying it signed a nondisclosure agreement with the federal Department of Health and Human Services.
In a letter obtained by The New York Times, dated Aug. 3, a lawyer for the Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies cited the nondisclosure agreement in refusing to provide information about its process for collecting and sharing data; its proposal to the government; communications with White House staff or other officials; and any other information related to the award.
A spokeswoman for Department of Health and Human Services said members of Congress should direct their inquiries to the government, not the company. But Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, sent a letter to the agency in June seeking similar information and has not received a reply, her office said.
The arrangement was unusual, Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School who teaches about government contracts and anti-corruption, said in an interview.
“One of the cornerstones of the federal procurement system is transparency, so it strikes me as odd,” she said.
TeleTracking was responding to a July 22 letter from two top Democrats: Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and Ms. Murray. The two recently introduced legislation aimed at protecting data transparency — an issue Mr. Schumer addressed during recent talks with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, according to a person familiar with their discussion.
“The Trump administration’s decision to hire a private vendor and then cloak that vendor in a nondisclosure agreement raises numerous questions about their motivations and risks the ability of our public health experts to understand and effectively fight this virus,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement Friday.
The controversy over the contract stems from the administration’s abrupt order in July for hospitals to stop reporting coronavirus information to the C.D.C.’s National Healthcare Safety Network — a longstanding government data system — and instead send it to TeleTracking for inclusion in a coronavirus database overseen by H.H.S. officials in Washington. H.H.S. has said the switch was necessary because the C.D.C.’s system was slow and incomplete; the government uses the hospital data to make critical decisions about how to allocate scarce supplies, like ventilators and the drug Remdesivir.
The contract — and in particular the sudden switch in reporting from C.D.C. to TeleTracking — generated objections from public health experts and outside advisers to the health agency, who say that the new system is burdening hospitals and endangering scientific integrity by sidelining government experts.
TeleTracking is majority owned by its chairman and chief executive, Michael Zamagias, a Pittsburgh real estate developer.
The manner in which the contract was awarded has also generated confusion. A government website initially listed it as a “sole source” contract, but H.H.S. officials later said there were six bidders, though they refused to name the others, saying they were, saying they were “prohibited from sharing that information by federal regulations and statutes.”
Ms. Tillipman said it is also unusual for the government to keep the names of bidders a secret.