There are multiple clear reasons to do this actually. We have COVID inquiries in my country the UK. Part of that is looking at excessive spending on unnecessary or inappropriate equipment and corruption with regards to spending. Looking at vaccine manufacturers is important as it’s the governments job to regulate these things. They are the ones who paid for the vaccines and determined who got what type of vaccine and in what order. If there was a possibility to vaccinate people faster and more efficiently more people could have survived and our economy might not be quite so bad. It’s also possible that serious side effects caused by the vaccines could have been reduced. We can and should hold both the NHS and the pharmaceutical companies accountable for what they have and haven’t done.

Furthermore we should continue pursuing improved vaccines in the name of eradicating the disease. There was talk of a new vaccine called nova vax. I am now wondering what happened to it.

As for “absolving” people who didn’t get the vaccine. I am not sure what to say here. I don’t think you should guilt people over decisions they made about their own body. That’s a morally questionable thing to do. I say this as someone who got three shots of vaccine for COVID.

Pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of epidemiology. To prevent an outbreak you need only get the r value below 1. The r value being the average number of people and infected person passes the disease onto. That’s why we were able to successfully eliminate smallpox and suppress measles and other common diseases in developed countries. Even in countries where most people got vaccinated for COVID like my home in the UK this did not happen. There are still outbreaks of the disease in places with high rates of vaccination. This tells me we are in need of either a better vaccine or a new strategy like anti virals. There was actually talk of improved vaccines like nova vax at one point.

I am not from the USA and was not talking specifically about the USA but go off I guess.

COVID does not undergo as rapid antigenic shift as influenza viruses. It’s more closely related to cold viruses (hence coronavirus which are cold viruses) which generally mutate more slowly. So I don’t think this is the whole reason even if it’s part of the explanation. There are other parts of the viruses behaviour and characteristics that maybe could explain this. It doesn’t really make a difference for my point though. The vaccines were substantially less effective than promised. We also didn’t have to use experimental vaccine techniques and could have saved money by using cheaper vaccines.

They aren’t anti-vax in general though. They didn’t have a problem with the vaccines used in the 90s and neither do I.

COVID vaccines were and are different, at least the ones used in the west. China and Cuba used traditional vaccine types such as inactivated vaccines which contain whole dead viruses. These are cheap and easy to mass manufacture and have been used for decades.

USA vaccines used mRNA which was a newer and more experimental technique that hadn’t seen deployment at this scale ever before. The UK vaccine ChAdOx1 used a different technique involving using another virus as a vector (specifically an adenovirus). Again this is a new and somewhat experimental technique. Now the UK vaccine is at least reasonably easy to manufacture and distribute. The mRNA vaccines on the other hand were extremely difficult to distribute as they required very low temperatures to be stored, basically cryogenic temperatures. This required new techniques to be developed to distribute and administer them at the scale required, and was very difficult for the global south to do. They were also more expensive.

So you could argue that at least some of the vaccines (mRNA type) were a cash grab or not suited for global use and were just a way to get more money for big pharma. If this is actually true I have no idea.

In terms of effectiveness this is where it gets interesting. None of these vaccines were as effective as originally thought. They often did not stop people getting infected as was originally claimed (supposedly more than 90% effectiveness for mRNA vaccines). This is why COVID is still in circulation today. The vaccines did reduce symptoms and hospitalisation, which is certainly better than nothing, but it’s also not what was promised. So yeah I can understand why people are pissed. It also seems that using the more expensive and supposedly more effective vaccine types was basically pointless as traditional vaccine types or the cheaper UK vaccine would have worked just fine.

Do 386s not have caches? I thought they did.

Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did.

I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.

What I am not saying is that no one should learn any maths at all. I don’t know how you got that from my comment. It’s like you are deliberately trying to misinterpret what I am saying.

Did you actually read what I wrote or the context behind it? I don’t think you did. I am saying not everyone wants to learn these things just for the sake of it. Some people want to learn the parts of maths that are more practical and want to be given practical examples. I don’t see a problem with accommodating those students or looking down on people who think that way like the original commenter was doing.

Not really. Not everyone enjoys advanced mathematics the same way not everyone enjoys english literature or engineering, or arts and crafts. People have different interests, aptitudes, and skills. That’s how the world works.

I would love one day to try coca leaves and coca tea. Sounds much healthier than processed cocaine.

How can you look at SpaceX and not say they are much more efficient than NASA? It’s actually a good thing they blew up so many rockets as part of research and development. It allowed them to achieve a rocket that can do things no other rocket can, like landing back on it’s launch pad, at a fraction of the cost of a NASA rocket to boot. The phrase is move fast and break things for a reason. I am all for giving NASA more budget, but I also think we should invest in SpaceX technology. It’s clearly superior no matter what you thing of Elon and his cronies.

Also didn’t Trump want to cancel some of the NASA moon missions?

MAGA like all mainstream politicians support science and technology when it suits them and agrees with them, and tear it down when it dosen’t. That’s just a fact of life. The other parties are no different, nor is the far left. You can see this with all the talk from leftist groups hating on AI and calling for data centers to be dismantled. There are some who call for the deindustrialization of society in general like the whole solar punk movement and agrarianism. The only political groups who legitimately always support science and technological progress in all it’s forms are accelerationists and accelerationists come from all over the left-right spectrum.

None of what you are saying really adds up. Yes they are trying to establish a base on the moon and mars. That’s a hell of a long way to setting up an independent colony up there that’s self-sustaining and actually confortable enough for rich people. Many rich people would rather die than live somewhere like the ISS, and the ISS is miles and miles away from being in any way self-sustaining. They are tied to supply shipments from earth. We are decades away at the minimum from having somewhere fully self-sustaining on mars, the moon, or even LEO nevermind somewhere Jeff Bezos would want to live. Jeff and Trump would die before that happened.

There are loads of reasons but if you want a practical one we should do it for the helium 3 and other materials that can be found on the moon and in space.

If we are talking about SpaceX then maybe you are correct. I don’t think that’s even close to true for NASA who are surviving on a much smaller share of the budget than they had in the 1960s.

Actually they made this whole project on a much smaller share of the national budget. That’s why it’s taken them so long. So this is actually ass backwards.

What you should actually be doing is pulling funding from the military and putting it into NASA and other programs. You spent so much for so long yet are struggling against Iran, a tiny country with a fraction of your budget and man power. It’s embarrassing. Stick to things you are actually good at.

Before this mission the furthest humans have been was Apollo 13 which essentially did a flyby like this one. This one will do a similar manoeuvre but slightly further away from earth.

I agree that these kinds of missions are needed but this isn’t really comparable to Apollo 8. Apollo 8 made it into lunar orbit, this one is just doing a fly by. In a lot of other ways it’s an improvement. Much safer, carrying more people in comfier conditions with better video cameras and even bringing women and non-americans. Not just test pilots either, but actual scientists. It’s a representation of what’s changed since Apollo for both better and worse. NASA has much less of the USA’s budget than it did for Apollo, and things took much longer. It’s also been stated that the next mission won’t make it to the surface as it was originally planned, but is instead going to be testing the lunar Landers in lunar orbit. They are relying on Blue Origin and SpaceX to not just build but also launch and transport the Landers into lunar orbit. It’s very different to how things were done back then. If this was like the Apollo programme and they started at the same time we would have landed multiple times by now probably some years ago. Apollo really was a crash development program.

Who is Nicole?