Around 20% of people have a fear of needles. Around 4% have a clinical phobia, often intense enough to induce fainting.
I suspect a lot of "vaccine skepticism" is just an expression of such needle phobia.
Maybe developing more needle free vaccine delivery mechanisms would solve a lot of this problem. I have much doubt about arguing people out of phobias.
I don't see any evidence that the level of fear of needles is different now from what it was 10, 20, 30 or more years ago, so it is hard to see how it could be a significant factor in falling vaccination rates now.
It's not. It's scientific ignorance combined with lies (Wakefield) and misinformation. There may be some small percentage of people who completely avoid injections but most people who understand vaccines accept the benefits outweigh the short term fear / pain of needles.
No one is arguing that such a thing as wealth creation doesn't exist. The question is about who or what creates it.
Which is a topic of intense discussion in economics over the last few hundred years, BTW, and the discussion here so far has shockingly few references to those.
Well gee, to start France has higher healthcare quality/access, higher life expectancy, much lower treatable mortality, better work-life balance (less hours worked, more guaranteed leave), lower wealth inequality, higher voter turnout (indicative of less apathy or less efforts to disenfranchise), among others.
One of the problems with just using economic metrics is it seems to confuse the fact that the economy is supposed to serve society, not the other way around. So it leads one to wonder: with those better economic measures, what is it buying for US citizens?
Many Americans have a strong bias for measuring everything in money. If you've lived there, it can be shocking how pervasive the thinking is in EVERY decision.
All these things become meaningless when you cross the ~50th income percentile.
Besides work/life balance, the US gets much better as you earn more, and frankly high earners are generally less concerned with time off work too.
Also why the US enjoyed ~30 years of European brain drain, those benefits are much less enticing when you are the one paying more and getting less.
Median US income is $45k. Almost 18% of US household income goes to healthcare costs. So you’re saying healthcare access/quality, time off, and mortality are moot once you make $23/hr? Color me skeptical.
I mean, you're on the cusp there but $23/hr is around where "full benefits" jobs become the norm.
Also keep in mind that French pay a lot for healthcare too, except it's called taxes. That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US.
This only gets more dramatic as you climb the income scale, which inevitably means (in France) you are paying way more taxes (41% at $100k) while using those social services the least.
Compare to the US where you are paying 22% on $100k and likely getting high tier health insurance for ~$200/mo from such a job.
The takeaway is that America sucks if you are poor, but gets much better if you can make it out of the bottom half, and way better if you can get to the top 25%.
P.S. there is a reason the media only talks about the bottom 50% and the top 1%. Talking about the 50-99% would reveal where the real money in the country is (and offend/call out half the country too).
> That $23/hr in France would be taxed at 30% compared to 12% in the US.
So, since you're full of shit, let's do the math. I'll even be kind, I'll go 1$ = 1€. 23€ per hour, 35h/week, 4 weeks per month (broadly). 3220€ gross, which, to cut things short and not even get into gross -> net, let's assume 100% of your gross is now net, is 38640€ / year. The 30% tax BRACKET starts at 29316€. 25% gets taxed at 30%, 60% gets taxed at 11%.
Anyways, you're full of shit, I just needed people reading you to know it.
Benefits are paid based on hours worked not on rate. You also seem to confuse marginal and effective tax rates because you don’t factor in the other tax structures in the US like FICA/state/local taxes. On the US healthcare side, you have to factor in deductibles; my annual family HSA deductible is $8k. And on and on. As a general rule, I try not to spend much time debating with new accounts that miss basic facts/principles.
But this all digresses from the point: simple economic indicators like GDP without fuller context are a lazy and misleading metric for evaluating the health of a society.
This is why I spent most of my career in startups. I did work at big companies twice for a few years, and it strongly reinforced that decision.
Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.
You get to vote for one of ~5 alternatives every 4 years. This then propagates to hundreds of decisions in a way that dilutes your influence to practically nothing.
This is commonly known as "LLM-as-a-judge" and anecdotally multiple people I know who write code using OpenRouter or using multiple models say it's surprisingly effective. It's strange that there don't appear to be any major papers on it since ~early 2025, which at this point is basically ancient history.
Here is a piece of history trivia. Not trying to have an argument.
> they wanted to bypass what they considered "trading bottleneck" created by Ottoman
The Ottomans didn't exactly close the Silk Road, but they made it harder and more expensive to use it.
But the major reason for the maritime routes taking over the cargo traffic was that it's much more efficient to sail to Asia with your cargo than to walk it on camels.
So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
>So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.
This new route discovery actually significantly increased the importance of Strait of Malacca and Singapore, not decreasing it.
Actually even before that important turning point event, the European already knew about about the importance of Strait of Malacca including both the metropolis Malacca and Singapore/Temasek. The is one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".
To say that Singapore was an obscure fishing village is disengenious by the colonial powers and those believing this wicked narrative are in denial.
My once top comment about this "elephant in the room" has been downvoted to oblivion, but hey c'est la vie. There's a very popular saying, "you can fool some people all of the time, and all people some of the time, but you simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time".
There's also a narrative that if the tea via land it's called chai and if if the via sea it's called tea [1].
The Ottoman controlled both the land and sea route to Europe creating the trading bottleneck from the European perspective for many centuries to the far East, they never close it. Thats's why both Dutch and British created their very own East India Companies about the same time around 1600 CE as the vehicles to trade in Asia once they found the new trading route around Africa to Asia. Due to their highly profitable business endeavour, their governments willingly become the side-kick colonizers for their new companies and becoming complicit to wrestle and overcome any countries that refused to their own unfair business arrangements, terms and conditions including trading monopolies.
[1] Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea (317 comments):
With AIs as teachers, I disagree. But with AIs assisting routine grading, filling in the university's assessment_framework_draft_v3_final_FINAL.docx, and otherwise freeing up time to actually focus on students - maybe? Although I fear that any productivity gains will be swallowed up by further reductions in lecturer headcount...
AI lacks both the reasoning and insight needed to teach anybody that isn't already immensely interested in the topic, and even then might leave large knowledge gaps, not to mention how often it hallucinates wrong knowledge. Especially with topics that already have a lot of bad information floating around.
Perhaps. For now, one of my one-on-one tutoring sessions (in real analysis) this semester consisted mostly on un-teaching a student a bunch of wrong crap they "learned" from ChatGPT.
I'm thinking of custom built Teacher AIs, trained in how to teach different kinds of students, and with well defined curriculums.
Even if they're not better than the best human teachers, I think being able to "personally" interact with each student 24/7 will be a huge improvement.
I suspect a lot of "vaccine skepticism" is just an expression of such needle phobia.
Maybe developing more needle free vaccine delivery mechanisms would solve a lot of this problem. I have much doubt about arguing people out of phobias.
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