iguy

I don't know about respect. The data is on persistence of status. They can do this in many countries, those are just two I remember (besides England).

Direct records of ancestry are too scattered to piece together long timescales. What he (and collaborators) do is to find very rare surnames, in records at some distant time (e.g. Oxford graduation in 1600, high-status, or common criminals executed then, low-status) and then trace look for the same name in later data (e.g. Victorian wills, or today's tax data). Rare names give you a fairly targeted marker. One which the carriers are often unaware of.

Yes. The political point being made with this history is different too, it's one of pride, not shame. It's "Our great ancestors were nice social democrats, too! Unlike your cold-war army, grandpa, they let woman have front-line jobs!"

Compare: "Those evil germanics who sailed up the Volga and subjugated our ancestors, you know how much silver they took home? And you've seen how wealthy Copenhagen is now? My buddy Igor ran the numbers, and compound interest explains it all!". That's not a speech which will improve your political career in Russia.

Yes to slavery being widespread in Europe of the dark ages. The church had something to do with its demise but I'm not sure it's one papal edict. Economics too.

But if "late Middle Ages" means say the time of the black death, and after, then at least in Western Europe that's much too late. By then slavery in England is long gone (or so rare as not to matter) and serfdom is in steep decline, and we are still several centuries away from European overseas slavery (no sugar islands before Columbus!)

Slavery in the islamic world was (I think) pretty continuous from the beginning until the 20th C. (Perhaps with ups and downs? There were many violent changes of leadership, over the centuries.) In the middle ages this would have been the primary meaning of slavery to Europeans -- the risk of being caught in some coastal raid and sold for labor (or for ransom, if noble). This no doubt horrified the pope but he had little power to stop this.

Clark finds this pattern in most societies, IIRC Sweden and China have (in his data) almost identical rates of status persistence. It's not a quirk of English manners.

What varies more is the degree to which ordinary people today descend from the nobility in (say) 1100. In some societies they had many more surviving children than average, e.g. it's easy for them to double every generation, within a basically static total population, implying that their offspring make up a high proportion of people after a few centuries. But in other societies, they did not.

His books are pretty readable, BTW, interesting data.

They also aren't a useful rhetorical foil for any present-day arguments. In none of their former territory can you make political hay by deflecting present-day problems onto those particular earlier rulers. That's related to time, of course, but also very much related to what else has happened since, or has failed to happen.

And, does the severity of your case depend strongly on your dose?

This could have been extremely interesting early on. If it turned out that (say) severe cases in young people required a huge does, then it might have been possible to "vaccinate" everyone under 40 by only-just infecting them.

Yes I mostly agree, it does set a good precedent, even if all it now gives us is "normal science" data.

Would like to understand better how much of the time was needed to ramp up production. My assumption was that Moderna & co. were working on that full speed, and once they'd made enough for the trials, stockpiled every dose they could make until approval.

If they'd had today's production rate in (say) April, I think we'd still have got all the deaths of the first wave. Unless, perhaps, knowing that vaccination was only a few months out would have allowed a much stronger lockdown, but I doubt it.

Title should (IMO) contain "human challenge". Most vaccine trials have involved humans, but none have involved deliberate exposure, i.e. "challenge".

Seems crazy this took so long. Why didn't this happen last summer?

"begs the question" is another phrase whose meaning is now in the uncertain zone, by the same process.

It is exciting. But what's a bit unclear (to me) is how re-usable safety testing is. Are we going to arrive at stage where we can "push to production" after this 48 hour design phase, or are we going to need months-to-years of trials for each new code?

It's clearly no a silver bullet.

There may be opportunities for more blue-collar variants. I'm trying to think where but there was some program to hire former soldiers as teachers, which is a bit like that.

Failure is a pretty strong word, they all went on to do other things, better paid, they had options. They tried to teach, for a while, because they wanted to.

My point is just that they all underestimated how difficult controlling a pack of teenagers was going to be, even those who were at nice schools "with a PTA". That's what I think was meant by "babysitting" above (not my choice of word), it's a real hurdle. As you seem to agree.

I'm dubious that the world is short of video courses. But many people do miss out on human interactions which could show them other paths.

Anecdotally, all my over-educated friends who tried to take up teaching (after something else) gave up. Citing this reason, and sometimes the level of bureaucracy.

Because it's a mixture. Some rowdy kids are just bored sick, and can't see any point in memorising crap for another stupid exam. These same people might really benefit (let's say, HN) finding out there is more to coding than their teacher knows about, and that you can get paid to do it. Finding out that school-teachers aren't the only adult role models.

But the guy who might show them that might, this semi-retired engineer, may not have the skills or the desire to do crowd control, well enough and long enough to get through.