So does this mean that the mRNA vaccines are probably going to be like flu vaccines, where they have to predict which variant will dominate each season and adjust the doses accordingly?
Can other options like the adenovirus-based or J&J ones be expected to cover a broader spectrum of mutants?
(And why are so many people downvoting these questions? I'm genuinely curious, and I really tried not to offend any sensibilities, but did I say something wrong? Oh god why do people always hate me so much? Is it possible to say or do anything right anymore? Maybe it's time to quit social media...I'm out, y'all are cruel.)
I think you're probably being downvoted (note: not by me) because the way your comment is written makes it sound a bit like you're assuming the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is an mRNA vaccine when it's not.
Problem is, the platform is a vector virus that causes immunity against the vector. So while you can create a new vaccine for the variants, you either cannot reuse the vector or you can't vaccinate old-variant-vaccinated people against the new variant. The body would kill the vector too quickly, limiting exposure to the payload too much.
In that respect mRNA vaccines or live vaccines have an advantage.
I don't think that's correct (but I'm willing to be corrected by an expert).
I believe the immune response is mainly triggered by the spike protein. If the spike protein of the variant is different enough to cause a degree of vaccine escape, then the spike protein of the vaccine should be different enough to not get immediately cleared from the body.
This is based on what I've understood from listening to interviews with prof. Sarah Gilbert, head of the Oxford team.
The parent is referring to a valid concern that with repeated doses (like from a subsequent booster), the mild antigenicity of the vector virus itself can be a problem. The Oxford vaccine uses a Chimpanzee adenovirus, which can infect human cells but not replicate inside them. There after delivering the vaccine payload, over time the protein coat of the vector will be chopped up and presented to the immune system, as are all cellular proteins. As you are unlikely to have been previously infected with a chimp adenovirus, it should elicit not much of an immune response, but the body will see it as foreign and start raising antibodies against the adenovirus proteins (adenoviruses have their own versions of "spike" proteins, among others). Of course, we would expect most of the immune response would be against the corona spike payload, but some fraction would inevitably be for the adenovirus as well.
When you get your second dose, you already have some antibodies against chimp adenovirus, which will potentially destroy some of the vector before it has a chance to be taken up by your cells. Third or fourth booster shots against coronavirus variants using the same chimp adenovirus vector would trigger worse reactions, destroying some portion of the vector before the payload can be delivered. The Russian Sputnik vaccine tries to reduce this likelihood by using different adenovirus vectors for each dose.
It's not clear how much it'll continue to mutate. Since this is a brand new virus, it's had 100M+ people so far to experiment on, and clearly the early versions were not as efficient at spreading as the newer variants.
Once we have herd immunity through vaccination (since natural immunity is rather hit-or-miss) I would hope the rate of mutations slows down significantly.
Logically i would have thought the opposite would have happened, since natural immunity is mostly to the nucleus protein (difficult to mutate), and vaccine immunity is based on the spike protein (easy to mutate). I would have thought any partial vaccine immunity would increase mutation rate.
Also been worried that mass vaccinations might short-circuit the mutate to less severe variant process that happens in nature. By taking the advantage away from the current spike configuration we might give an advantage to a worse variant that would naturally have died out (out compete by its parent variant)..
Disclaimer; I'm more qualified to write a science fiction novelette on this theory than a medical paper, so take all this with a big grain of salt.
It's probably too early to say if the vaccines have had any effect on the mutation rate, since wide-scale vaccination has only just started ramping up.
You'd think it'd be easier to say whether people are getting reinfected after catching COVID the first time, but the testing data is sparse enough that there doesn't seem to be any confirmation on whether it's widespread or just isolated cases. Most notably in Manaus, Brazil, where one of the new variants has been spreading.
I'm definitely not qualified to make anything other than wild guesses on this subject, but everything I've read suggests that scientists are scratching their heads as well. Conventional wisdom is that the spike is the easiest to target, so whether the human immune system picking the N protein is a mistake or brilliant move seems to be up in the air. Some reading: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-00480-0
Mutating to a less severe variant: Given that SARS-CoV-2 already has delayed symptoms and a high percentage being asymptomatic cases, I'm not sure there's much pressure to make it milder. Also the overall spike design is what gives SARS-CoV-2 its higher infectiousness compared to the original SARS, so one would hope that mutations to it (to avoid existing antibodies) would tend to make things less effective, although unluckily the virus has been discovering some new configurations that are both more infectious and also less protected against by the existing vaccines (especially the 60-70% ones). Paper on infectivity of variants: https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674%2820%2930877-1.pdf
It’s worth noting that the Oxford vaccine can be quickly altered too, as it’s based on a platform technology. They suspect a version with variants can be in production and being rolled out by August.
I wonder though if the really good trial data of the MRNA ones mean they’ll be able to do just safety trials (nothing on effectiveness) in the future, while the Oxford collaboration will be closer scrutinized.
What you are saying might turn out to be true. There was a report on how Chinese vaccine was good in some countries but not doing well in Brazil, it may be related to mutation as well. If the virus mutates fast because countries are not controlling the spread well enough, current vaccine may be less and less effective in time. I am sure the producers are updating their vaccines in meantime. It will take time and the production will take time as well.
Unfortunately mRNA vaccines will not be a universal solution for all countries, it will only be applicable for a few rich countries.
I feel like it is optimistic to think that we will be allowed to live our lives the pre pandemic way. These new strains will be trotted out as a good excuse to keep these restrictions around much longer.
IMO no government in the US is going to indefinitely ban large indoor gatherings, indoor dining, bars, schools/universities as usual, physical conferences, etc. And any "rules" notwithstanding I fully expect that when summer rolls around and a lot of people, especially the more vulnerable, have been vaccinated whether it's imperfectly or not are going to back to beaches, bars, concerts, etc. At some point, it's just another disease of which there are many that sometimes kills people.
All pandemics end eventually, but it depends right? It depends on hospital capacity and how infectious and lethal the variants are and if the vaccines work and how fast the spread is. Not to mention super spreader events.
Covid wild-type was/is bad enough to crush global hospital systems so that's really a big issue. It will take years to train more doctors and nurses to run covid wards if that's something we decide to do.
Also things won't go back to normal because our hyper-globalization and world wide travel has definitely increased the risk of pandemics. So we have to think of the next unknown one, use technology to prepare as well as implement risk reduction processes. Covid testing for international travel will probably never go away.
Your comment appeared to be complaining about downvotes (as does this one). Even if not that though, it's at least commenting about voting, which the guidelines discourage.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I expect a comment more likely to be well received would be something discussing and/or reinforcing the specific points the parent made. In that context it would probably be fine to say something like, "I don't think you should have been downvoted." But without context or reasoning it doesn't have much substance.
"I don't think you should have been downvoted."
The virus is in the same family as some of the common cold virus'.
Coronaviruses replicate their RNA genomes using enzymes called RNA-dependent RNA polymerases. (RNA is relevant)
https://www.newscientist.com/term/coronavirus/#ixzz6lrn6xyYr
I agree that people on HN downvote reasonable opinions and questions that do not go against HN guidelines.
It is the reddit effect. At first Reddit was like HN populated with highly educated people. As it got more and more users it democratized: The vote of a know-it-all 16 years old is the same as the one from a PhD in the field. In fact there are thousands of non experts for each expert, so they always win in a public space.
We add to that that we are using text, we do not carry intonation and other emotional information and lots of people will misunderstand whatever you say.
So the more popular a place like this becomes, the most degraded it becomes.
Do not take that seriously. I had great karma when I posted my real identity years ago and now lots of my comments are downvoted too, and I am the same person. I did not care then and not care now.
We absolutely can find more productive things for those folks to do. America’s infrastructure needs rebuilding, and clean energy can create so many jobs. A humane society doesn’t necessitate lack of access to jobs.
Many American regulatory institutions have crumbled in the past few decades, the FAA being a particularly jarring example.
In some cases it seems like peoples' trust in those regulators may be fueled by nostalgia, but the FDA does seem like one of the few agencies that has retained some measure of independence.
Looking at what has happened in this nation's other industries and institutions, only one crippling decades-long medical crisis doesn't seem all that bad.
That's not an explanation for why the FDA has failed to address the regulatory aspects of the opioid crisis, but an argument for why we should discount or ignore that failure. At the very least – this is a non sequitur.
I disagree. Regulatory capture is a clear and present danger to the United States, and it is contributing to a breakdown in accountability across all sectors of the nation's economy and society.
So I offered it as an explanation for why the FDA could be well-respected and reasonably functional, while the United States fails to address some acute public health issues.
Things could be much worse; at least they don't turn a blind eye when huge sums of money are not involved. It's still very rare for a drug's approval to be pushed through via fraud, and there are a lot of diseases that need treating. They have a solid track record, even now.
The FAA are the ones responsible for stopping shit like the 737Max fiasco. Yes, Boeing did it, and many people there deserve to go to prison, but the FAA is supposed to be the guardrail ensuring they can't get away with it in the first place. It was an objective failure, and it has eroded the trust in them - point in case, most other aviation regulators did their own checks on the 737 Max before allowing it back to service, which usually doesn't happen ( EASA trusts FAA's ratings and vice versa).
We're also very good at not thinking about certain things, though. And I doubt anybody would make a system of immortality that didn't have an escape hatch.
Alpha Centauri is prescient as ever on this subject:
>I plan to live forever, of course, but barring that I'd settle for a couple thousand years. Even five hundred would be pretty nice.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview
Of course, we would surely need to expand to other planets before we got anywhere near a 500-year lifespan. We can't manage this planet's resources properly even with a 70-year one.
>Back at the Base I was furious to hear of discussions of the possibility that the atmosphere might be detonated. This possibility had been discussed at Los Alamos and had been quashed by intensive studies of all possibilities by Hans Bethe and others. It was thoughtless bravado to bring up the subject as a table and barracks topic before soldiers unacquainted with nuclear physics and with the results of Bethe's studies.
This part is interesting. I had always heard that there was some concern about the Bomb literally lighting the sky on fire, but it sounds like they did their due diligence.
This link has some details about what they were actually worried about - which appears to be that a nuclear weapon would trigger fusion of nitrogen nuclei:
That's fascinating - and, later, a somewhat similar calculation was done erroneously. The yield of the Castle Bravo bomb - the first hydrogen bomb to use lithium as its source of tritium - was 250% greater than predicted, on account of overlooking the prompt conversion of lithium-7 to tritium when bombarded by high-energy neutrons.
I'm sure I read that someone had done that calculation for Castle Bravo and was watching the test and for a few moments, as the fireball got bigger and bigger and bigger, that they had actually got the calculation wrong!
People like you and I didn't decide that it was what we wanted. We just have no other options, because the companies which impose the terms aggressively snuff out or buy up their competition.
I would argue that people are accepting these terms under duress; "consent" is the wrong word.
The market believes that Facebook et al will be able to continue enforcing their will unilaterally, and that is good for the companies, so their stocks go up.
I agree in principle, and so did I, but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life. It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.
Also, if you own a small business, there's a real chance that you'd rely on Facebook for a significant portion of your business, because without a presence on their platforms you had may as well not exist.
Yes, valid points. Also don't think they should hold social interactions hostage in an effort to not lose their grip on selling your attention span. If their product is worth paying for or the individuals in question are too cheap to pay for it without using ads then so be it. Let them monetize on ads, but I don't expect anyone to give a shit about small businesses profiting off our data. I didn't agree to support them by selling my data so I don't feel any emotional attachment to their situation.
> It's wrong that people are forced to decide between accepting predatory terms or losing touch with friendly acquaintances.
Yes and no.
While I've lost touch with a few older friends I don't do anything with, I've learned that reaching out by iMessage and SMS is welcomed by a lot of people. Instead of talking to people the lazy way and posting on Facebook, I text them individually or in small groups and the response tends to be much warmer and ignored less often.
I've always thought I was bugging people, but I've found that many friends appreciate the more personal approach.
> but there's no denying that it puts a major crimp on your social life.
I completely deny that.
I deleted Facebook when I was 25 and never once missed it. It never once put a crimp on my social life because my social life was never really organised around facebook in the first place. I still wanted to keep in touch with friends, and they wanted to keep in touch with me, without facebook.
In the obvious way for some people? It's disingenuous to pretend that opting out of FB doesn't have negative social consequences for some (many?) people, and dismissing their concerns probably isn't a good way to change anyone's mind.
I deleted my facebook account a long time ago, but I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events because of that. Facebook events are the easiest way to invite people to a party or other gathering.
> I definitely do not get invitations to some parties and events [..]
Our 7 year old goes to an arts and crafts centre, in the aftermath of the furore over the WhatsApp Terms of Service update the organizers changed their contact details to suggesting reaching them via Signal instead. So we switched. Job done.
A lot of my friends use social media to stay in touch. Not being on social media would keep me out of the loop, which is not desirable. I try to restrict its usage as much as possible though.
Collect alternative methods of staying in touch with friends you care about before leaving social media (phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, etc.)
Yea. If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore, then I have bad news for you: they probably aren’t really your friends. When I ditched Facebook about 10 years ago, I lost contact with a whole bunch of people who weren't really part of my life anyway, they were simply "names I recognized."
My social life actually got better after dropping social media simply because I'm spending less time scrolling in front of a screen.
> If your friends will abandon you just because you’re not on social media anymore
That's a very binary view of the world that I don't share. But that's not a topic I want to get into.
Can you keep in touch with a certain group of friends through non-social media platforms? Absolutely. I do it daily, but that's not the point.
The point is that staying away from these social media platforms reduces your ability to have a social life. It's quite like saying that you decrease your chances of finding work without a driving license or cellphone number.
I could probably get away without social media today (modulo telegram/whatsapp). But at what point would I surrender? Most people of my generation use it, and it looks like newer generations will have even higher usages.
No one actually needs a car either. Or to eat industrially produced food. Or etc. etc.
"Nobody actually needs X" where X is a thing that empirically a huge percentage of people do, is I suspect never a compelling argument.
edit: bordercases brings up a good point, I picked particularly entrenched/difficult areas for examples but it wasn't necessary.
My point was more about the futility of observing a common behavior and rejecting it superficially, so perhaps I should have used "Nobody needs a smart phone" or "No family of 4 needs a >2000sq/ft house" or the like as examples.
Categorically yes, but the connotation is that it's still possible for the vast majority of people to get rid of Facebook and still lead a satisfying life. I can buy this. I can reason that it's likely true from e.g. the hedonic setpoint. There are a lot of people that were happy before Facebook and will be happy after Facebook is gone.
Facebook is only ~15 years old and it deals mostly with aggregating text-based communications from people that feel the compulsion to post almost entirely because it's there. And they don't need Facebook, they just need the functions it provides; there was a time when these functions would have been split up into separate services until they were acquihired or integrated.
And although Facebook is monolithic, its monopoly is primarily enforced by network effects and conventions. Shit happens, like stock rallies or privacy scares. Facebook might still be around but the exodus of e.g. WhatsApp to Signal still shows the power of close substitutes to challenge what is "necessary".
There's also nothing fallacious in your counterargument. Both cars and industrial farming are being challenged in their own right. Cars for issues behind pollution and sprawl (resulting in ride-sharing, electric cars and transit) and industrial farming for its ethics and chemical impact on the environment (organic food, veganism, greater awareness of bioaccumulation of pesticides and microplastics). In educated circles these have become widely considered as Good Things, but would involve challenging the assumption that things we take for granted as necessary are actually so. That's just progress.
I think you miss the point the point I was trying to make (i.e. I didn't articulate it well).
Regardless of how trivial you think it is, the fact that so many people demonstrate a preference not to should make you think harder about the problem. It's not just the technology, and many tech people tend to get this wrong consistently.
Let's put it another way: if it was actually as trivial as you seem to think, it probably would have happened already.
That makes the point a lot worse, and really just comes across as you responding to a set of assumptions nobody is actually making.
What is the ‘it’ which you imagine people think is trivial?
Who is saying anything is trivial?
Where is anyone saying it’s just technology?
Who said people don’t have a preference to use Facebook?
How do you know how hard people have thought about this?
I don’t think Facebook is trivial to replace, but that isn’t because people are dependent on it in a way that is comparable to the other examples you mentioned.
Unlike the examples you listed, people can easily do without Facebook. There just isn’t much incentive for most people to do so, since they don’t perceive the downsides adequately.
I think we're down in the weeds here - so I'll leave it at this. I shouldn't have focused it on tech so much, other people make the same category of mistake.
The assumptions that I am talking about are basically this. (1) "people can easily do without Facebook", or the variant that "Facebook isn't very important to them" (2) There are viable replacements available to the people who do value this, at least in their own estimation.
Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.
Hence this falls in to the category I was drawing, mainly that if you say "People don't really need X" and lots of people are at the same time saying "I really need X" and "I don't see a good replacement for X" then you are far more likely to be wrong than they are.
You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.
Ignoring most of this, because you really are just talking about your own assumptions about what other people are thinking, which are nothing to do with me.
However your example:
> You dislike all my examples, try this one "Nobody needs a fossil fuel engine car". Obvious, right? Electrics are available and better in every way (just ask your favorite tesla owner). Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do. Even when technically true for some values of "fine" and "need", it's not useful.
Is interesting for two reasons.
On the one hand, it’s just as bad as your prior ones, because the impact of doing without a car at all will be for many people quite significant in a way that I maintain is simply not the case with Facebook.
I know all kinds of people who have stopped using Facebook and it just hasn’t been a big deal, unlike all the examples you bring up.
On the other hand, I would imagine most people would simply accept that electric cars are a viable alternative to gasoline cars today, and that they will eventually switch to one in the future at some point, even if the economics don’t make sense now, which again makes this analogy just inapplicable to talking about Facebook.
What I take from this is that you are arguing against an amalgam of views you have seen elsewhere and trying to dispel a kind of misunderstanding that is somehow implicit to what you have seen.
I don’t really have anything to do with all that.
What I’m suggesting is that you dispense with these analogies, and simply consider the possibility that people don’t actually need Facebook, and that quitting Facebook wouldn’t actually have much impact for most people. Of course there are exceptions, but that’s not the point.
Being willing to consider this possibility sheds light on Facebook’s own behavior as well as the current situation with regard to what would make things better.
Why would you think it ‘laughable’ that people don’t know their own best interests? That seems to just trivialize a complex issue.
Many of us hold that it is important for society to treat people as though they do, but for the most part that is an ethical assumption that restrains abusive institutions. It’s equally true that most people know that they don’t know their own best interests in many ways, and we all obviously hold many false beliefs about both ourselves and the world. It’s pretty easy to think something is more (or less) important to you than it actually is.
Ok, you haven’t said anything remotely convincing to me as to why these are a actually different category, rather than a scale. And you seem to be misunderstanding what I’m truly if to say prettty consistently. Regardless of whose “fault” that is , this really isn’t a good forum for getting into properly, so I guess I’m out.
> Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do.
This argument is symmetric: telling me that I need FB because someone else does is equally fallacious. You want to break the symmetry by appealing to "the vast majority of people", which leads me to...
> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people.
This is contingent, or at least more contingent than your confidence reveals. This is the point was making in my previous post, when I was giving examples of how things can change, rather than assuming what many people want now will be the same as what they want later.
Appeals to the crowd, like appeals to expertise, are useful as a first-pass heuristic of what's valuable and true. However, without other evidence, the hidden assumption is that there is exists an equilibria justified with a claim along the lines "if you're so good why aren't you rich" or "since people are rational things would have changed already if they could". This is an assumption which you've stated earlier.
The way that you strengthen this type of argument is by giving reasons why it's impossible to go back or move forward from the equilibria. Here, your standard of evidence has been weakening from the categorical "it's never compelling", to the economic "it's otherwise intractable", to the pragmatic "your view isn't useful". This isn't wrong, but it's consistent with underrating that Facebook's ubiquity is conditional, not set in stone. You've backed yourself into a corner by first staking a categorical claim while using a heuristic.
In my view, this issue is about (a) whether there really is path dependence that produces an unshiftable equilibria, and (b) whether privacy violations are necessarily coupled with social network use, such that people wouldn't switch at the opportunity to safeguard their privacy if the social networks are otherwise equivalent for their friend group.
For |A|: The path-dependence claim is trivial to refute: people have switched social networks before, and use some social networks more than others. Facebook is the biggest social network in existence, but a part of this comes down to acquihiring other social networks to prevent them from being competition. Instagram and WhatsApp are two examples. TikTok is an example of a competitor to Instagram and WhatsApp that has seen massive growth. From the business side, businesses usually aggregate across many social networks at once rather than using social networks directly. They care about Facebook because that's where users are, but they don't need their users to be on Facebook. So as long as Facebook doesn't keep acquiring their competition it will be possible that their userbase can switch.
For |B|: Suppose that people were maximizers, yet with bounded agency. If most people can acknowledge that violations of their privacy are bad, but social networking is good, yet they aren't smart enough or wealthy enough to roll their own and get everyone they interact with to switch, we should still expect ceteris paribus that they would want to switch to the privacy respecting option given the right opportunity. Since you've assumed that people must be maximisers, you must think that people generally don't value their privacy if given an option between more or less privacy, if you also think it's impossible for Facebook to be less valuable in the future, and thus no one will ever find a good reason to switch, thus changing the equilibria.
To be honest, I will be disappointed if I'm wrong when it comes to how the crowd values their privacy - that's also an empirical assumption. But this leads into the next point.
> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.
I'll pull a Fermat and say that I countered this argument in writing, but it was too long to put in the margin.
The long and the short of it is that people knowing and adhering to their best interests completely, is also empirically incorrect. Instead people's preferences are weighed differently based on situational factors, and the self-control that people have to enact their desires against temptation, also varies situationally. People don't exercise when they claim they want to etc etc.
As for the second claim, it isn't actually weak, again for reasons which are empirically true. People aren't maximisers, and if they were, they'd still be bounded in agency. So even if people are fully rational about their desires, they don't always know or understand the influence that these companies can or do have over their lives until it gets past some threshold of salience to take action.
In terms of what's different now, we're in a difficult climate, not just in the USA but globally, across the political spectrum and between cultures. Even though we've "known" about the influence of social media to control the flow of information for awhile, censorship on social media has become much more common, intensifying for larger numbers of people and for more high-profile events. This change in scale has been enough to trigger e.g. an exodus from WhatsApp into Signal, or will likely cool the usage of social-media in general if privacy isn't an option.
If both trends continue to hold, the case against our initial assumptions, as they were empirical, will dissolve.
But I don't go to a school that posts assignments on FB (I have heard of this quite a bit), my workplace doesn't use it (ditto) and I'm in a comfortable-enough place that putting up with the passive aggression from family and friends when they whine about my comm preferences is no big deal.
Yes, everyone has options. But not everyone operates under the same pressures.
Actually I run a live theater venue and the vast majority of our tickets are purchased through a combination of Facebook advertising and Facebook event pages. There’s no getting around that. I had deleted Facebook but needed to reinstate my account once I got involved in the theater industry. It’s really frustrating actually. Facebook is the Comcast of social media, you don’t really want to use them and you know they’re abusing you, but you don’t really have a choice.
Is Facebook still creating shadow profiles? Whether or not you have an account with them, they might still be harvesting data about you. An individual can't really "delete FB".
It's very narrow-minded to assume that because you don't need Facebook, no one does. Facebook clearly provides some value, or no one would use it at all. Some people can't afford not to take advantage of that value. You can't tell a small business "don't use Facebook for social media outreach, it's evil and monopolistic" when the alternative is being outcompeted by those who do.
Totally agree. I have a very niche small business (you can check my comment history) and all the community is on facebook, it has completely replaced forums. I don't have a choice, I need facebook and instagram otherwise I wouldn't be able to reach them.
Don't leave without a concrete goal and a timeline. What do you want to work on, with who, and why? Don't give up the pay and benefits until you can answer that, and make sure that you budget for N months/years out of work. Idealism doesn't always pay well.
IMHO, don't sweat the IP stuff to much, until you start spending a lot of off-hours time on a serious project (website, incorporation, etc). If you don't have a specific business plan, don't sweat it.
That might be an unpopular opinion, because it probably would leave you vulnerable in most at-will employment contracts, but as long as you don't take anything with you when you leave, big companies are unlikely to aggressively enforce anything.
And this should go without saying, but leave on good terms. Do right by the people who you work with and don't leave them holding any bags. It's the right thing to do, and you might want their recommendations if things go belly-up. Plus, part of the reason why the company is unlikely to go after you on technicalities is that they want to hire creative people like you in the future.
Anecdotally, these findings mesh with my experience in a US city which had a vocational school; I wish these sorts of programs were more popular outside of Europe.
Apparently it's not too common in the States, but our vocational school held tours for local students in the last years of primary school, and they had solid job placement rates for various trade fields. They also did summer programs for local kids.
The article points out that average income/employment outcomes are a bit lower for vocational students, but I like that they try to control for that by looking at things like admissions data.
IME there really is a certain sort of high-scool student who, compared to 4 years of classes, will get a lot more out of guided access to something like a garage, bakery, daycare, machine shop, etc. The vocational school still taught ordinary classes, but on a part-time basis with the student's concentration.
Plus, adventurous locals could sometimes get cheap services. Want to have some fun? Tell your passengers that your car's oil was just changed by a 16-year-old student, while you're on the highway.
Give people more rights, and enforce violations. It won't happen, because the sort of rights that we need would obviate a huge swath of the economy.
But put simply, I think that we need to make it highly illegal to use information asymmetry to take advantage of people at a large scale.
People need legal protection against the natural "just make it work already" instinct that makes us blindly accept TOS terms and follow dark patterns. It would be laughable to argue that a significant portion of users actually understands what they are agreeing to.
Can other options like the adenovirus-based or J&J ones be expected to cover a broader spectrum of mutants?
(And why are so many people downvoting these questions? I'm genuinely curious, and I really tried not to offend any sensibilities, but did I say something wrong? Oh god why do people always hate me so much? Is it possible to say or do anything right anymore? Maybe it's time to quit social media...I'm out, y'all are cruel.)