Microsoft has been doing various flavors of mobile OS development since LONG before iOS or Android. The first release of Windows CE was back in 1996, roughly contemporary with PalmOS and Apple's NewtonOS.
To be fair to anyone so motivated: the word "public" wasn't necessary to the comment. Loud, substantial private funding for such an endeavor would presumably solve the problem just as well.
(They also might be thinking that "regulations around reporting" pose a substantial free speech issue.)
I think you presume too much of private entities, which would always put their financial interest first (lead gasoline science studies come to mind, tobacco/cancer obfuscation... etc)... you can't trust a private company not to act in its own financial interests, that's not how they work.
At least with a public entity, you should be able to publicly audit what's happening, and with public funding to answer to, the public's interests and the proposed entity's financial security are aligned properly.
One would counter that if private money was at all interested in resolving this problem they may have done so at any time in the last 3 decades, which is only the most severe the crisis has been, not it's full duration.
One would also counter that regulations regarding the accuracy of speech existed in 1987 and were by most accounts, pretty effective at keeping news informative and balanced, as opposed to after those regulations were retired and we got politics being covered like sports and the political divide becoming larger and larger as time goes on because making people angry and scared of the Other is pretty profitable, while getting them balanced, informed coverage is both more expensive and not as appealing to the consumer.
Oxygen masks definitely aren't unimpeachable good. Passenger oxygen mask systems are virtually never needed but have caused multiple fires that destroyed planes and killed people. They are an expensive complication without which plane travel would be better - the plane would be cheaper to build, there'd be more room and weight available for passengers or luggage, and we'd all save time on safety briefings from not having to hear instructions on how to do a thing that you certainly won't need to do.
The pilots need oxygen masks as a backup while they quickly descend to a safer altitude. Unless you're flying over the Himalayas and can't drop that low, the passengers should be fine.
> I was under the impression that masks don't protect you that much, they protect other people from you?
That claim has been made but is questionable. The masks were designed to reduce exposure to the wearer, not so much from the wearer.
It's a matter of physics: When you inhale the suction generated automatically pulls the mask tighter on your face such that the air you breathe in essentially all has to pass through the mask but when you exhale, not so much.
In designing a mask there is a choice between a finer mesh or a looser one. If you pick a very loose mesh - say, cotton gauze - then air is easy to push through when you exhale but so are virus particles. On the other hand if you pick a very tight mesh - say, N95 or better - then air is much harder to push through but exhaling forces the mask slightly away from the face such that moist potentially virus-laden breath puffs out the sides and top. This is why your glasses fog up when wearing an N95 - moist air is escaping out the top of the mask completely unfiltered. (You can find youtube videos demonstrating this process with cigarette smoke). Double- or triple-masking doesn't help either - that makes it even harder for air to pass directly through the masks so even more air pushes out the side and top instead.
If your N95 is VERY well fitted and the strap VERY tight - tight enough to make your ears hurt - you'll get less escape, but wearing a mask that way is sufficiently uncomfortable that almost nobody does it.
In short, an N95 does plausibly filter nearly all the air you breathe IN, but if you want to filter the air you're breathing OUT, you really should be wearing a cleanroom suit.
I have some on the ground experience with Chinese manufacturing and what I saw was fine - it was relatively low-paying transitional work people do for a few years when they're young - like working at McDonalds used to be here - before they move onto a better job. The conditions aren't great by our standards but it's a much better working environment (and better paying one) than the alternatives available in the region.
US concerns have largely been overblown outrage clickbait. At the peak of the hysteria Mike Daisey did an interview on NPR's This American Life based on a one-man show ("The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs") in which he claimed to have personal knowledge of how bad the conditions are at Apple factories. I saw his show and it seemed clear to me Mike Daisey was lying; it eventually did turn out he had invented and/or exaggerated most of the details and NPR had to retract the episode:
Regarding Foxconn suicides: It's hard for us to wrap our heads around the sheer scale of Foxconn - the fact that one company in one area had more workers than the entire population of Wyoming throws off our intuitions! Even at its peak the suicide rate at Foxconn appears to have been lower than the suicide rate for China in general, much lower than the suicide rate for Chinese college students (the closest age group we have data on) and even less than the suicide rate for American college students. So there was nothing unusual in having that number of suicides given how many people lived and worked there. Did they put up fencing around one building? Yes, but we do that here too whenever one building or bridge or cliff becomes an attractive area for suicides. For instance, San Francisco right now is spending over 200 million dollars on an improved suicide barrier for the Golden Gate Bridge:
There is indeed a range of factory work. Some is unpleasant but most of it is quite pleasant. In particular electronics assembly tends to be on the more-pleasant end of the scale because electronics assembly is sensitive work. Our traditional idea of "sweatshops" - hot, dirty, sweaty, poorly-ventilated, poorly-lit work - was associated with a particular era of garment manufacturing. Electronics assembly is absolutely nothing like that and the reason isn't for the benefit of the workers, it's for the benefit of the product. Electronics assembly is done in rooms that are clean and well-lit and well-ventilated and temperature-controlled because if they weren't, the product wouldn't work. Circuit boards hate dust and moisture; companies get the best yield rate in terms of working product at the end of the line when the workers are comfortable and clean and there's no dust and they can see clearly what they are doing and they have the right tools available for the job.
So far as I could tell, the workers on the line were happy and comfortable.
Caveat: My personal up-close experience is limited to a couple medium-sized firms in Guangdong: IDT (Integrated Display Technology) and GSL (Group Sense Limited). IDT is the Chinese company that assembled LCD-containing products for Sharper Image under the house brand "Oregon Scientific" in the late 1990s-early 2000s. I worked with these companies as the QA representative of Pocket Science aka Pocket.com while they were building PocketMail products. In that capacity I talked to the assemblers and their managers and sometimes worked beside them on the assembly line.
Nearly all of your links are broken. I think you copy-pasted the text of links that had been truncated with a "...", where the part prior to "..." is not sufficient to constitute a valid web address.
For instance, the link for Carvallo et al 2010 should be this, which resolves:
https://medicalpressopenaccess.com/upload/1605709669_1007.pd...
...or perhaps the addition of one more competitor makes this area become known as "the ice cream district", pulling in ice-cream-seeking customers from surrounding areas and attracting complementary businesses, with the new competition and higher profile making all three shops more successful and better-known than they otherwise would be.
I've never heard of an ice cream district. Supporting articles welcome. (I'm aware of, say, fashion districts or restaurant districts.)
I'm genuinely interested in what kind of research one should do if they want to successfully start a restaurant. I will likely look around myself at some point, but if anyone wants to give me links to good stuff, I will totes give one whole free upvote in exchange.
Green tea ice cream is quite popular, you should try it! It used to be something you found mostly in Japanese restaurants but nowadays you can find it in grocery stores as well. Mr. Green Tea was one of the first big US suppliers, they've been prominent since the 1990s:
> I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.
Black's Law Dictionary defines the word arms as "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon."
The word "arms" in the right to keep and bear arms explicitly meant weapons that could be carried by a single infantryman. It was never about (and still isn't about) tanks, or cannon, or warships, or nukes. So no, you don't have to be committed to allowing tanks to be fully keen on the right to keep and bear arms.
(if you still doubt this, focus on the word "bear". You can't "bear" a tank, if anything a tank bears you.)
That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US. They're expensive, get terrible gas mileage, probably not street-legal to drive on the freeway, unlikely to fit in your garage and the neighbors are bound to complain if you fire the main gun...but you totally could own one (and drive it around your own private property) if so inclined.
I don't think that any American civilians own a working MANPADS, regardless of willingness to undergo background checks or pay for tax stamps. And that's explicitly designed for a single infantryman. I'm not well versed in the constitutional law but there seems to be a principle that extremely dangerous weapons will not be owned by civilians in the US, regardless of historical precedents, textualism, originalism, or any other contrary principles.
I'm also curious about the constitutional ramifications of the ban on civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Could any class of small arms be gradually banned by specifying a date of manufacture cutoff for legality in a similar way? Seems contrary to a plain reading of the 2a to phase out weapons this way but I know that my layman's plain reading is worth very little here.
Actually it may also be about warships; the US has language related to the issuing of letters of marque embedded within the Constitution, and issued them from the nation's creation up through the civil war.
You could register the gun and make it fully legal to use under the NFA in which case yes, you could possess shells and even fire them. There's paperwork, but it's possible and some people do it. Um, here:
(Making, say, a 50 caliber gun legal under the NFA is indeed somewhat more onerous than owning a shotgun. And a gun rights advocate certainly could care about trying to make it less so but they're not required to care about it because - as I said above - a tank doesn't count as "arms".)
Even say free speech absolutists don’t pretend that the interpretative process doesn’t matter. Pretty much everyone recognizes say that fraud was never protected as free speech.
> if not for the FDA to come down on operations like Theranos, then who?
Theranos was committing fraud - selling investors a product that didn't exist. You don't need the FDA for fraud to be illegal, ordinary civil and financial law covers this.
If Theranos weren't defrauding investors and actually had a product that worked, it'd be up to the market to determine if that product were worth paying for. Since different customers have different risk profiles there's no one-size-fits-all best balance between safety, efficacy and cost - let people buy different products that choose different tradeoffs.
Theranos was in fact testing people, who received both false negative and false negative results.
From the article I link below:
> At its height, Theranos operated 40 “Wellness Centers” in Walgreens stores in Arizona and a single location in California, which were the source of much of its revenue. USA Today reported the metro Phoenix-area centers alone sold more than 1.5 million blood tests, which yielded 7.8 million tests results for nearly 176,000 consumers.
> Theranos was committing fraud - selling investors a product that didn't exist
Well, the FDA is not the SEC--and Theranos was also providing patients with erroneous lab reports! This is more than a bit worse than wasting the time, money, and reputation, such that it may be, of Tim Draper, George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, et al.
