glenra

In most other contexts, rich people being able to spend money for some good or service would simply induce more supply ultimately making the product cheaper and better for the masses as well. The rich get to be "early adopters" buying a product when it's expensive and not very good; the poor as "late adopters" get to buy a product that is cheaper and works better once the bugs have been worked out. So...why exactly are resources and talent considered "finite" when it comes to health care and shouldn't we maybe look at FIXING that rather than take it for granted?

Consider, say, food distribution: McDonalds has traditionally made far more money as a private business catering to the tastes of the poor and middle-class than any fancy restaurant ever made catering to the rich. Do fancy restaurants like Per Se "suck up all the resources" needed to cook and serve food? Does the existence of fancy restaurants hurt McDonald's by making it harder to find burger-flippers? And does McDonalds in turn "suck up all the resources" thereby making it harder for people in some other context to find and acquire food? If not, what makes healthcare so different?

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 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.

...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.

> 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.

> Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me.

We might be thinking of different situations. I'm mostly imagining a car or truck that does great on the freeway but poorly on surface streets or poorly on particular KINDS of surface streets or even particular KINDS of weather...and we KNOW this and can recognize those situations. The remote driver typically jumps in BEFORE the part that is actually dangerous.

This isn't a new problem - consider a big ship that delegates harbor navigation decisions to a harbormaster and/or tugboat, or a big plane that delegates final runway approach decisions or parking at the gate decisions to a control tower and/or local guy driving a tow vehicle or waving directional flags. You could slice the world up into "regions we can reliably navigate without help" versus "regions where we still need a little help", with the latter group shrinking over time as technology advances and maps get better and edge cases are better handled.

The initial product offering might be for long-haul truckers - the truck drives itself for hours on separated freeways and then throws to a handler when it needs to navigate unfamiliar local surface streets for a delivery. But once you've GOT that sort of infrastructure - basically a map with geofenced areas where remote drivers step in - it's a logical next step to make the help areas dynamic and mark slowdowns or detours due to an accident or a landslide or a cow on the road for similar handling.

95% of that job would not be stressful. I'd be more worried about it being boring...but then, so is normal in-person driving.

> Anything less than 100% FULL automation is MORE dangerous than manual driving, because the "driver" will almost certainly lack any situational awareness.

With enough reliable bandwidth a decent workaround is to have the system fall back to human control by someone other than the local driver. I'm imagining a Car Traffic Control Center where your onboard robot driver sees a situation it doesn't understand and throws control to a remote driver wearing a VR rig with your car's video feeds as input. The remote human driver assesses the situation, steers you carefully past the weird obstacle/issue then returns control to your robot.

A system where robots drive automatically, say, 95% of the time while human remote drivers handle special cases 5% of the time still seems like a big improvement over the status quo - there's a market for that.