Everyone in the VC community who helped elect President Trump is partially responsible for each child that suffers and dies from a vaccine-preventable disease due to this action.
I don’t see what this has to do with Trump receiving the most votes. The public had ample access to evidence that Trump is a traitor, among other things.
I don’t subscribe to that. People are inherently racist/sexist/classist. They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.
That is why Trump was right about him shooting someone on 5th Avenue and getting away with it. He was smart enough to tap into this undercurrent that I was unaware of, perhaps due to my youth.
Yes, we grow into that as we turn into toddlers, then hopefully we grow out of it. One of our simple core algo's is categorization, but it's just a base algo which came out of base survival techniques from the days of yore.
> They were okay with the idea of equality of opportunity, but once their relative social ranking started to drop, they reverted to their base instinct of pulling others down to make up for their own failings.
This is true to some extent, and very sad. However, it does not apply to everyone in my experience. It only applies to those who see the world as a zero-sum game. If I understand the last few hundred years correctly, thanks to technology, we do not live in a zero-sum world, so it's an obsolete concept. Once you learn that, it overrides those old base algo's, if you are in a social circle that allows this. However, those base categorizations do appeal to our base instincts, so it's an effective political campaigning technique for those politicians who have no shame.
I ain't young no more, and the biggest change in US politics that I have seen is that being shameless has become normalized, again.
There are many examples of when super racist/sexist/political people get to talk with those who they once hated, they drop all those previous trainings, and just see them as fellow humans, and even friends. This is why those who use the obsolete categorization ideology as their entire identity don't want you to go to university, or travel, where you might learn all that.
racism, sexism, classism etc are structural issues. individual prejudices are fear-based levers that are manipulated by bad actors in order to serve economic goals.
it doesn't appear to be difficult to manipulate people using these levers when you're also responsible for the dogshit economic and social conditions they find themselves in.
And ample access to 1000x more lies than truth. For the people who are media illiterate, facts don’t matter and truth is replaced by confirmation of priors.
I think what gets people's goat is the VC community crowing about being farsighted futurists... and then acting just as human and shortsighted as everyone else.
Hence the schadenfreude.
It's one thing to be wrong with everyone. It's another to be wrong after a ton of people said "This is a dumb idea."
Balancing humors? Odd way to phrase that. I am saying that if you save 1 kid in an extreme situation but injured 1000 to do it you are causing more harm than good.
Our current policies favor fearmongering and cherry-picking to influence people to seek medical treatment that they don't need and come with side effects.
The fact that Doctors get paid a kickback for high child VAX percentages alone is enough to make me toss out the whole idea.
Hacker News is a social media site for people to talk about (usually) tech-related news. It might be hosted by, and fully run by, a tech startup incubator, but Y Combinator isn't exactly a household name, and the only real indication that this site is related to the incubator is the domain name.
It's pretty easy to come across this site if you're just generally interested in tech stuff (I think everybody I talk to knows exactly what I refer to if I say "the orange site"), and if you're someone who's interested in tech but not particularly plugged into things like the mechanics of startups or business, well, there's a lot on here that's not related to that.
I'm sure if someone came to a site called 'hacker news' and didn't delve deeper past the main content board, then it would be easy to not organically discover what a VC might be.
It's just weird I guess as someone thats been here a while that there are users that don't know the word VC given its history in the VC/tech startup community.
Context matters though. If you're in a place that has always been about baseball and you say "I have to admit I don't know what a pitcher is" it's going to be a bit weird for the regulars.
In this case though I guess it's just hard for me to recognise how much the focus of this site has shifted and that people can come here that seemingly have no interest in startups/tech/vc.
I hope everyone remembers the deluge of gloating blog posts and podcast appearances by the SV tech (thought-)leadership from early February 2025, before the wheels predictably fell off.
So, does that mean that everybody who helped elect everybody who shaped FDA is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths? I mean I sympathize, but seems a little extreme
Dear god, there are mechanisms in place for this already, and they are so loose they are farcical.
It’s incredible when I read this sort of comment, and then I realise that the comment is so badly ill informed that I need to respond. But it does make me wonder what sources of information the other person is reading…
Well then what are you reading. It’s well known that Pfizer and Moderna required immunity from lawsuits in order to provide the vaccine and every country gave them that immunity. Here it is from CNBC.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effec...
Perhaps you were thinking about compensation from the government, but the original poster was talking about actually holding Pfizer and Moderna liable.
Okay, work it out for me: how was that a bad trade for world governments and society?
People still have an avenue to sue for harm -- they can sue the government.
The government took on that liability in exchange for preventing the spread of a highly pathogenic, novel pandemic with moderate mortality, thereby allowing return to normal life, with fewer deaths, faster.
VI claims are still paid (faster, with lower standard of evidence, and cheaper to everyone involved). Lawsuits that go through court involve law firms and the investigations become extremely expensive for everyone.
Manufacturers (and rhetorical supply+delivery chain) are monitored by medical orgs and the federal government to ensure the doses remain safe, after passing the initial trials. These review systems catch incidents like the Samoa measles vaccine incident (in which a few nurses were at fault for injecting from the wrong bottles, which RFKJr was on the wrong side of) and other incidents where some vials were contaminated. Unless a VI plaintiff can prove gross negligence, the outcome is better under the current system. If they can prove gross negligence, they can still take a manufacturer (or any other defendant involved in the supply chain) to court.
The government decided that vaccines are a public health net positive and designed to current system to spread the risk across manufacturers and the government to ensure the cost of litigation didn’t eliminate this very useful tool.
Wait. Maybe I'm misinformed, but I believe all vaccine makers are immune from lawsuits. This started back in the 80s, and had nothing to do with COVID.