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91 is respectable for a reasonable man in the early 21st century. A few unreasonable people want a bit more.

Nothing unreasonable about wanting to live healthy and longer. It's not likely tho.

A guess?

That’s what people always say until science progresses. I remember when we believed HIV would not be treatable.

Science advances one funeral at a time.


And most of them will die before turning 91. Like most people.

You’re part of the problem, not the solution. There’s an entire political backlash against EVs because of mandates. The Trump Administration actually prevented California from having EV quotas.

Simply let in EVs from China and let American car companies go out of business.


There's a political backlash because Fox News and some Russian propaganda social media accounts told people to get angry and they did.

We have mandates against leaded fuel and excessively tinted windows and for child seats. We have mandates for airbags and seatbelts and bumper heights and crumple zones and turn signals.

EVs are better than gas cars in every way - less noise, less pollution, less dependency buying oil from the Middle East. Our policies, regulations and incentive structures should mirror that.


If they’re better, you don’t need mandates.

Sad to say, the best does not always win. There are countless examples in technology, products, politics, etc etc.

Fortunately EVs are also cheaper. Unfortunately, the US has a 100% tariff on the less expensive Chinese EVs and batteries.

Better and cheaper does win.


EVs became cheaper because of a variety of mandates from Governments in California and China, amongst other places.

There's a political backlash against vaccines because of mandates too, and I think we shouldn't listen to them either.

No, there really isn’t.

Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet. I thought he would eventually turn the company around but Intel was priced for bankruptcy.

Stock price has tripled since last August. Hopefully, Intel is really back. They do need a couple of Fab customers.


Was it Pat or Brian? If I recall correctly, it was under Brian when Intel had one of its worst periods of stagnation, when the 10 nm process all the bets were on turned out to be a non-starter, and when Meltdown and Spectre erupted. It's easy to overlook this because Intel had fairly no competition around then, but that doesn't mean the company was in a good shape.

I've always felt like Pat was a scapegoat who was chosen to clean up the mess when the whole place was already up in smoke and the smell was only starting to leak out. I liked his strategy, was disappointed to see him booted out.


BK really destroyed the company and Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision. Pat was the visionary who saw the value of the fabs but it took a long time to turn things around.

>Bob Swan was the finance guy who did not have a vision

Let's be fair to Bob, he has the vision, but dont know how to execute it because he lacks the technical knowledge.

He was also the one who finally settled the argument I had for 5 years, if Intel were to made 250M Modem for Apple, where is the additional Capex for capacity expansion on their Fabs. The answer, only to be told by Bob in a 2020 interview was they never really planned for it.


I think the 5G modems were intended to be manufactured by TSMC even before they sold the division to Apple.

>Pat killed Intel’s share price. Should have paid more attention to the balance sheet.

Let's face it. Everything he cut, and products / department he sold were what he wanted to do on day one. He had to force his hand, make the stock price worst and ultimately force the board to allow him to do it.

You could argue he laid all the foundation for today's Intel to thrive.

Yes, I am pointing the fingers at the board. Although words on the street was the board also have their hands tied as they were also beholden to large institutional investors. It is all a Game of Cards.


I don't understand what you mean. Stock price has tripled since last August based on Intel finally having a competitive architecture and a competitive process again, no? At least that in combination with various geopolitical circumstances. Sounds like Pat's decision resulted in Intel's stock price rising?

“The stock price has tripled since last August”

That’s just a statement of fact. I offered no other analysis.


This seems like analysis? "Pat killed Intel’s share price."

I suppose if you just look at a chart…

Then what?

Much like a president, most of their decisions take years to really be felt. The major changes Pat made weren’t going to change the balance sheet for years.

What exactly has Intel done that’s dramatically different than Pat’s vision that you feel is increasing share price?

Or is it just that they sold their soul to Trump combined with Pat’s choices finally bearing fruit?


“CAR-T cell treatments”

I seen this discussed for the past several years to treat cancer. It does appear promising.

Unfortunately, it’s incredibly expensive.


Thorp is alive and in his 90s.

Here’s an interview with him from a few years ago.

https://youtu.be/CNvz91Jyzbg?si=vR8jxJ7iBCP0uYzk


Why can’t we just ask our governments to spend more on research? Want some rich person to donate $100 billion on cancer research?

The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.


It is a bit simplistic to assume that more money translates into better research outcomes.

Alzheimer's is a warning tale. Lots of money flowed into research of this condition, and was mostly wasted on a flawed hypothesis supported by scientific VIPs who had a face to lose in case it proved incorrect.

We don't necessarily need more money in research, but smarter ways of spending it. The current grant system rewards established players and reliable production of mediocre (or even fraudulent) papers over honest failure and actual innovation too much.


The United States and world spend huge amounts of money on this, not even to mention the enormous amounts of private research.

The takeaway here is getting money into the hands of smarter and more motivated people.


It's a problem of incentives.

Governments have a limited (although large) budget, and no incentive to spend it well[1]. You don't get promoted as a government administrator if you approve a Nobel-prize-winning grannt.

If you don't get rewarded for good work but may get punished for taking risks, you optimize for risk minimization, even if this means a lot of potentially-good work not getting done.

Nobody blames the FDA when millions of people die from the-medicine-hasn't-been-invented-yet-itis, everybody blames the FDA when ten or so people die from a side effect nobody saw. This impacts FDA policy.

This person has the best incentive there is in the world, the incentive to live. He didn't care whether the people getting his money correctly filled form 437-F, or whether they have the relevant paperwork that verifies their legitimacy in a way which can be described by legal rules.

[1] Incidentally, finance has (had?) the opposite problem. If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage * profit_generated), you will maximize risk, optimizing for bets that give you great returns most of the time, but wipe you out completely some of the time, as your losses are clamped to 0.


> If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage profit_generated)*

I assume you meant `max(...)`? Otherwise you will at best get zero dollars in bonus, and at worst owe your employer money. ;)

(I get min/max backward all the time too.)


No we absolutely don't. The US hardly spends anything on research.

The entire yearly budget for the National Cancer Institute is $7 billion dollars. To put this in perspective, that's 3 days of funding the DoD. For cancer. That kills well over half a million Americans per year.

The takeaway is that we should invest in research rather than letting people die.


> The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.

Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.


We are not the bosses of the people in the government, so asking does very little.


You can't compare the output of small teams driven by a fanatic with a single output metric with government funded research. NIH invests about 40 billion in research a year in the US as it is I believe.


I asked Gemini AI and it says the NIH spent $7.3 billion last year.

Would it be a big deal to double that?


Do we just keep increasing spending until the marginal value of further spending goes to zero so long as the next incremental dollar "isn't a big deal?"


In another timeline they're doing a "Cancer Moonshot" right now.



We’ve been discussing it for 30 years.

Having people making the same stupid comment after 3 decades needs to be handled more critically

Let’s go back 40 years and listen to the warning:

https://youtu.be/3NvgJ1b6JXs?si=yUKcegVwfyNGi2rC


We should show @blell some grace. Not everybody is born knowing everything. Today is the day they learned about climate change.


Grace is reserved for people with humility and a willingness to learn . Not self destructive suicidal death cult fools.


This again?

The test is optional. Feel free to skip it.

Tell 50 million people they’re likely to have Alzheimer’s then tell them where to donate towards a cure, or treatments to slow it by a decade.


Nobody is ever going to do that with this test, because the overwhelming majority of positive test results in a population-wide sample will be false, and the proposed diagnosis is devastating. This is a test for people who already have symptomatic dementia that helps confirm the diagnosis.


Well this test isn't for whether you will get Alzheimer's, so that disqualifies it before we even consider the accuracy.

But apparently your odds go above 30% if you live long enough, so if you could test for being in that cohort I think that result would be too common to actually be devastating.


> Tell 50 million people they’re likely to have Alzheimer’s then tell them where to donate towards a cure, or treatments to slow it by a decade.

Pharmaceutical companies have spent something like $50 billion on developing Alzheimer's drugs with, well, the most furtive of straw-grasping to show for it. It's probably the most expensive single disease target (especially as things like cancer are families of diseases)... the failure to have good results isn't for lack of money, and merely throwing more money at it is unlikely to actually make progress towards meaningful treatments.


It just seems really obvious to me that it's not one disease. One problem with the research is that there is SO much money. It's corrupting. There's a whole thing about the plaque cartel and if you aren't testing around a possibly flawed concept the availability of funds is much lower.

I just feel the thinking is off, it's like we are trying to treat cuts by removing scabs and scar tissue. We really need deep investigation on the sources, which I feel in many cases are industrial chemicals and how some people's body / immune system respond to them.

One of the most compelling studies I saw was how distance from a Golf Course predicted neurodegenerative diseases, based on their use of certain pesticides.


So, you’re saying it’s an unsolvable problem?

Someone always says “merely throwing money at the problem…”

What time period was the money spent? The last 25 years?

The United States spends $1 trillion a year in debt interest. $50 billion is nothing


I wonder if after services like 23andMe became popular and millions of people found out they have the Alzheimer genes, did donations towards brain research rise?


Gosh, it seems like only yesterday we were being shamed for flying to take a vacation.

Now, along with reintroducing measles, we’re preparing to really crank up our greenhouse emissions


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