I'm always a little confused by this claim. Focusing on revenue-generating products and not the user products they use to sell them: Google Search was their first success, then AdSense (third-party display ads), then YouTube. The latter two each make almost $30B/yr (run rate). Ignoring ads, Google Cloud makes >$20B/yr, as do Google hardware sales, with an additional $30B/yr from "non-advertising Other".
I don't really understand how one supports this claim without using decidedly non-standard definitions and grouping of revenue. If you insist on lumping together separate, wildly-successful revenue-generating products into overbroad groups by the manner in which the revenue is collected, and ignore a couple of objectively enormous revenue streams: Do you similarly feel that Apple "hasn't found a second gold vein" beyond "hardware sales"?
I would say it's the people visiting google that's the gold vein - advertising is the pick-axe. You don't make money with ads if no one visits. So in a sense making more and more products and reasons to visit is the gold vein.
Otherwise just saying advertising is a gold vein would mean people that put up a blank page with a single ad on it and no reason to visit would definitely not be a gold vein. So as others mentioned, its the Youtube and Gmails level products.
Google doesn't release net income numbers by business unit but in 2021 revenue for search was around $148B and Youtube revenue was around $29B. Given that youtube revenue dollars are probably much more expensive than search revenue dollars I'd say that ratio will skew toward more of the profit being in the search category than the you tube category, not less. It does seem on balance to be a relatively small part of their business dollars-wise, although I'd make the case that the cultural relevancy that youtube gives google has a non-zero value.
They don't break out the profitability of some subunits, but according to the WSJ it was "breakeven"[1] in 2014 with $4B in revenue.
I still don't see where the GP comment's confidence that it's not meaningfully profitable comes from. It doesn't seem like an uncontroversial assumption that costs have more than septupled in the last five years in the way that revenue has.
The numbers are trending in the right direction. From 2021Q1 to 2022Q1, revenue grew 43% (vs 34% at AWS and 46% at Azure), loss went down by 4%, and the loss to revenue ratio went from 24% to 16%.
IIRC the rumor leak around that was more nuanced: the leaks reported someone allegedly saying that market economics may not ultimately be able to support more than 2 leaders, because the economics will make #1 and #2 able to profit at prices that numbers 3+ can't compete with due to lack of scale. So the statement was that GCP has keep up or its ability to profit will be at risk, not that they'd shut down just because their slice of the pie isn't big enough if they end up as #3.
I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.
If advertisers felt motivated enough, circumventing PiHole would be trivial. Since all they do is block DNS requests based on a blacklist, an ad company just needs to serve their content from a trusted domain. Google owns plenty of domains which few PiHole users are likely to tolerate being blacklisted. They already do this with ads on YouTube.
Youtube ads are not a problem because of uBlock Origin / Newpipe etc... I have not seen an ad in Youtube in more than a decade.
But you are right. This could motivate them to move to a single domain for all Google content. But this is just another escalation in the adblock arms range. uBlock-style blockers would proliferate.
This is basically what youtube is doing. PiHole does not work on Youtube, but uBlock origin does (so does NewPipe, FreeTube and a bunch of software).
This would solve Google's immediate problem, but it's such a huge escalation that I expect lots of unintended effects not to Google's benefit. There is a reason they haven't done this, despite widespread adblocking use.
Yeah, the industry is definitely moving to that. Admiral, probably the most known ad-blocker-blocker already successfully circumvents PiHole and other DNS blocking by being served by the same domain.
I also expect Google to double down on Chrome Manifest v3 limitations if ad-blocking keeps getting more popular. Or even using DNS-over-HTTPS as a default on Chrome if ISP blocking ever becomes a thing.
For most customers, it seems they just went and bought about 2 thousand randomly-named domains and serve third-party scripts. However I've seen a couple places where Admiral was not blocked, because it was being served from a subdomain. I wish I had written down where it was to add to the EasyList or something. :(
The reason why Google (and other advertisers) do not do this is actually not because of the ad blocker arms race. On-domain ads are difficult to block, as can be seen by Facebook. But it also has huge trust problems, as can be seen by... Facebook.
Right now, with normal web advertising, the publisher (person with a website who wants to sell ads) tells your browser to go get an ad from the advertiser (the person paying for the ads), and that means that the advertiser gets a web request every time their ad is sold. This means that they can implement their own analytics and do not have to trust the publisher's, because the publisher merely kicks off the ad delivery process.
However, this requires separate domains or IP addresses, which can be blocked even at the network level[0] with a Pi-Hole. The alternative would be to serve ads straight off the publisher's site, which is how most social networks do it. Except... now you've just cut off every advertiser's data spigot[1]. If you do that, web advertising stops working - not because it's harder to target users, but because it's impossible to verify that you are paying for legitimate traffic to your website.
This is not a hypothetical. Social media companies already implement publisher delivery, and there have been multiple times in which they[2] themselves have admitted that their analytics and attribution were just plain wrong. That meant that advertisers were paying for traffic they never actually got. Publishers have an inherent incentive to inflate their traffic; the ad networks call this "click fraud" and it's when you run a bunch of bots to click on ads so you make more money[3].
The end of separate-domain advertising takes us right back to the days of television, where advertisers were buying specific time slots ("inventory") from specific publishers they trusted. The way that said inventory was priced was through random sampling of television watchers; but that relied on asking people to accurately record their TV watching habits. Good luck doing that when ads are served on a request-by-request basis.
Yes, you could randomly sample web users by having them install an extension that scans all their traffic and generates an equivalent log, but that almost certainly violates every extension repository's rules. Remember how Facebook was caught using their In-House signing cert to ship an iPhone VPN that did just that? That's the sort of sketchy shit we're talking about here. And any rules for detecting and reporting which ads were viewed could also be extracted and used to generate a tool for blocking said ads, which would be counter-productive.
So, basically, the reason why we don't just have publishers delivering ads is because it shuts out smaller publishers from selling them and puts advertisers solely at the mercy of Google and Facebook to verify that they actually got what they paid for. It would be a monopolistic power play few would tolerate.
[0] DoH and encrypted SNI complicates things, since it was also intended to be censorship-resistant - and we're trying to censor advertisements. However, you cannot encrypt IP addresses without taking on all of the inefficiencies of Tor onion routing. And you can also configure your web browser to just use the Pi-Hole's DNS instead of a public DoH server.
[1] Yes, there is an argument that telling the user's browser to make a request to another server is not "sending data"; this argument is stupid.
[2] Minimally, Facebook and Twitter; though other socials probably have the same problem.
[3] This is also why Google's antispam teams are secret police
Of course they’re not. It just might get more complicated for users but it’d be super easy for them to set up cloaking. uBlock could deal with that, ISP won’t.
Either way that will never happen obviously; Why would an ISP “block ads”? They’re literally hosting Google hardware (specifically YouTube’s cache)
In France, Free (one of the major telcos) has done exactly that. They block ads from the router that they give to their subscribers.
I guess they may be doing that to save bandwidth... They also have a tendency to offer features that few of their subscribers use, or even know about (some of their routers come with built-in VPN servers and torrent seedboxes).
I can see ad-blocking as a feature an ISP can try to sell. Imagine an ISP-level PiHole. (I can see this selling easily given how many family and friends asked me to install PiHole for them.
There's tons of qualified people that are unable to find work simply because of their immigration status. Having work permission in the US is a massive economic advantage so it makes the situation of Americans who throw away that gift they were born into that much more jarring and hard to sympathize with.
Anecdotally, a friend of mine has attempted to hire homeless people on multiple occasions to help him in residential demolition projects (no clean clothes, resume, or shower necessary). In one instance, he scheduled work for the following day and zero out of 8 people showed up. I'm sure there's homeless people that would like to work their way of the situation, but I don't think they are in the majority. Any solutions to this problem need to be more realistic about the motivations and intentions of the group they're trying to assist.
The other side of the "not showing up" story has merit too. I had a (former) friend that did the same, and asked why people hadn't shown up.
The pay is terrible. In his case, it was below minimum wage. He argued he could get better labor for minimum wage, so they could either take it or be replaced.
He was also renting them the same place they were renovating. It was a slum, and he was using their labor to improve it so he could kick them out and replace them with someone that would pay. Not exactly a thrilling proposal.
There was no safety equipment provided. It was an old building, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was full of asbestos (and maybe why he didn't hire a reputable company in the first place).
The place was filthy. Human feces in a bucket kind of filthy.
> Any solutions to this problem need to be more realistic about the motivations and intentions of the group they're trying to assist.
There's a grain of truth here. My phrasing would be "Any solution provided needs to be better than panhandling." Doing difficult physical labor for below minimum wage doesn't meet that criteria. Even at minimum wage, I don't know if it's better.
To elaborate, it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve". Somehow, sometime, we've decided that this value proposition was unethical. So now it's "work hard, or live in the social safety net, such as it is". This is much more palatable for many more people, despite the downsides, so many more people take the offer.
I assure you many people on earth would enthusiastically clean the worst filth in order to feed their families. This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.
> it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve".
Many people and cultures have celebrated and promoted leisure. The US strain of the Protestant work ethic is not most of human history, most people, or imposed by nature.
> This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.
It can be an individual triumph over circumstance, but the circumstances are still degrading.
You can celebrate and promote leisure only to the degree that it allows you survive. In tropical areas where food is plentiful year-round, there tends to be more leisure. In harsh climates that require hard work and careful planning to avoid starvation, there is less.
The protestant work ethic has led to the most successful economy on earth. Other economies competing for the title work just as hard. There is an ongoing competitive/evolutionary process of culture and ideas, and "work hard" is winning.
> the circumstances are still degrading
Why do you say that? What is degrading about destitution, exactly? I'm not sure those who live it, and especially those who choose it, would agree that they exist in a degraded state. I don't think degradation exists in nature, it is a condition imposed by one group of people on another. Destitution however is encountered frequently in the natural world, and in itself does not imply a moral condition.
I think you and I have a different set of core beliefs, but I can expand on my side as well.
> To elaborate, it seems that for most of human history the value proposition for most people, as imposed by nature, was "work hard or starve". Somehow, sometime, we've decided that this value proposition was unethical.
For myself, that turning point is when food ceased to be a scarce good. When food is scarce, somebody has to starve and allocating by contribution is a reasonable way to do it. When food is so plentiful that we inefficiently convert it to crappy gasoline because we have so much (corn) and cram caves full of it (cheese), letting someone starve is more of a conscious decision than an incredibly unfortunate situation.
In other words, being unable to share essential goods is very different from refusing to share essential goods.
I'm willing to sacrifice a portion of my efforts so that people don't starve. The "work hard or starve" mantra has a nasty implication that people who can't work should just starve. If you're going to provide for the disabled, it's no longer "work hard or starve", and you need a new justification for why people who can work but don't deserve to starve. It becomes very morally murky and arbitrary.
> I assure you many people on earth would enthusiastically clean the worst filth in order to feed their families.
Many people on earth would also enthusiastically kill each other to feed their families. That doesn't make it a noble pursuit.
> This should not be regarded as degradation, but rather strength and triumph.
I don't see any triumph here, so you might have to expand on that thought. I guess they're triumphing over starvation, but that's not really a show of strength in a country with 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stashed in a cave. It seems like calling breathing a triumph over asphyxiation.
If they were paid enough to live a remotely decent life, that would be a triumph. Enough to afford somewhere to live, food, a little leftover to pursue a passion.
Working hard and foul jobs so your boss can pay you so little that you're almost jealous of barn animals, so they can then use the money they saved to throw you out seems very degrading to me.
Most people take better care of their household pets than we afford the homeless. Most dogs do nothing but emotional support, yet we feed them, take them to the vet, make sure they come inside when it's hot/cold. Cats don't even do emotional support, they're mostly a walking curiosity. Everybody's happy with that arrangement, but the homeless wanting a semblance of fair pay for shitty work is a step too far?
For all of agrarian history resources have been unequally distributed - hoarded by few at the expense of many others. This is also true in nature - animals will viciously defend as much territory as they can, and not limit themselves to what they "need". Furthermore, having secured the best territory, food, and mating opportunities, they (whether as individuals or in groups) will spend their free time harassing their competitors. This is optimal behavior in a Darwinian environment - take as much as you can, and pull the proverbial ladder up behind you.
"Civilization" hasn't really changed the realities which give rise to these optima. It only defines the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. It doesn't change the rules of the game, as it were. We've not suddenly become a colony of ants, selflessly behaving as a single organism. Nor do I think it reasonable to carry the expectation that we suddenly will. Nor do I consider it particularly virtuous to compel us by force to emulate the ants.
Indeed we do have an excess of calories in our society, but that's not really the problem the parent post describes. It describes homelessness - often correlated with drug addiction and mental illness. When I see a homeless person, they don't seem much different to me than the similarly destitute animals sometimes depicted in nature documentaries. Those animals who, by failure or misfortune, have found themselves unable to compete with their peers and unable to carve out a niche for themselves. They wander listlessly, with ever decreasing energy and opportunity, until they finally succumb to their fate.
None of this strikes me as particularly "wrong" or "degrading" or really having any moral character at all. It is just an inevitable, inescapable, fact of life. To suppose otherwise is to think that human beings are somehow more special, or more intrinsically valuable than other animals. Given your comparisons to household pets, this clearly doesn't hold any water. In the scheme of things, we're just a hair more clever than our ape ancestors, and that has pushed us past a tipping point into civilization. I don't see how this makes us any "better" or more worthy.
Personally, given all of the above, I think it's best to embrace reality. We live in a world where optimal behaviour is self-interested and the cost of failure is total. This isn't a statement of values, it's an observation of fact. The only question that remains is how comfortable are you using force/authority to compel cooperation? I myself don't want to force anyone to do anything (and rather resent being forced myself). Authority should be used to ensure our coexistence is peaceful, and that we resolve disputes via due process. Beyond that however, I'm not very comfortable telling other people how they should behave, or whom they should help. I would rather die destitute than pry greedily into the pocket of an unwilling and uncharitable stranger.
> This is also true in nature - animals will viciously defend as much territory as they can, and not limit themselves to what they "need".
This is very much not true. It doesn't even make sense from an evolutionary perspective; why would an animal risk their life and waste energy to protect something they don't need? Some animals do take a sizable territory. Typically carnivores, who need a crazy amount of space to get enough meat. Most animals aren't even territorial.
> Furthermore, having secured the best territory, food, and mating opportunities, they (whether as individuals or in groups) will spend their free time harassing their competitors.
Again, this isn't true. Why would they do that? It's a risk and an energy expenditure for no gain. They'll fight over territory if they have to, but I have never heard of an animal going out of it's way to harass each other for the sake of it.
> It doesn't change the rules of the game, as it were. We've not suddenly become a colony of ants, selflessly behaving as a single organism. Nor do I think it reasonable to carry the expectation that we suddenly will. Nor do I consider it particularly virtuous to compel us by force to emulate the ants.
I think you're basing this on a flawed understanding of nature and how we fit into it. The only way humans are a dominant species is through cooperation. Not every person all the time, but in aggregate.
Humans are not particularly strong. Humans are not particularly fast. We are smart, but that's only helpful insofar as it improves our fitness, and can be a weakness due to increased caloric needs. As individuals, we are not particularly high on the food chain. What puts us high on the food chain is the ability to collaborate. We invented farming, giving us a caloric surplus. Then we created societies, allowing us to use that surplus to have people dedicated to research. We then use that research and some caloric surplus to have people create things like guns and concrete and ships that make us highly adaptable and deadly to the rest of the food chain.
Without that collaboration, we go back to being the middle of the foodchain and jumping at every shadow at night.
> We live in a world where optimal behaviour is self-interested and the cost of failure is total.
Self-interested behavior is too local of a maxima to be useful as a species. Evolution encourages the survival of the species, not the survival of the individual. A purely self-interested view would see the optimal solution being to take from others, leading to a collapse of the species. It takes a lot less energy to kill the farmers and take their crop than it does to actually grow the crop.
> Authority should be used to ensure our coexistence is peaceful, and that we resolve disputes via due process.
And this is the logical (rather than moral) reason why we take care of the less fortunate. Starving animals tend to become very aggressive, and humans are no exception. During the Soviet famines, people killed and ate each other. You can't tell someone starving to death that they need to peacefully coexist; it won't happen.
It is dramatically cheaper and easier to prevent that by just preventing starvation.
> why would an animal risk their life and waste energy to protect something they don't need?
To displace its competition and further secure its dominance of the local area. Too much is always better than not enough. Even animals who occupy enormous territories will seek to expand them further at any opportunity. Bands of chimps will murder neighbouring bands over territory, despite neither group being remotely close to starving. Coalitions of male lions will seek to take possession of a pride of females by killing the existing males and all of their juvenile offspring. Many groups of human hunter-gatherers, ignorant of the modern world, will kill strangers in their territories on sight.
Nature evolves these behaviours simply because animals who display them have a greater chance of passing on their genes. Anything but hostility to direct competition is usually suboptimal.
Human dominance evolved through cooperation in small familial groups numbering less than 100. That is what our social biology is equipped to handle. There are many examples of company culture fragmenting past ~150 headcount. Past that group size, we're no longer able to cooperate based on shared in-group status and mutual trust. The mechanism of civilization is bureaucracy, but the interactions are still between small tribes of people each competing for their own interests, and in practice totally apathetic to outcomes outside their group.
We've managed to put some rails around the process, but legal and corporate interactions are the civilized equivalent to war. The same language is even used. We're still the same apes, with the same limitations regarding, frankly, how many other people we are capable of giving a damn about.
> It takes a lot less energy to kill the farmers and take their crop than it does to actually grow the crop.
Not really sustainable over a generation though, is it? Your strategy has function long enough for your offspring to reach maturity, and their offspring, etc. The winning strategy is to take as much from the farmers as they will tolerate and funnel it into extravagant displays of power and social status that further cement your position. All we've done is put some rules around the taking, mandating (in civil society) that it be voluntary and not under the threat of violence. This way, you invent iPhones, sell them at huge margins to all the farmers, become absurdly wealthy, and no one need die. It's a winning system.
> It is dramatically cheaper and easier to prevent that by just preventing starvation.
I'm not actually sure that's true. Shocking escalation of violence is also effective, and very cheap. In places where amputation is a common punishment for theft, wouldn't you know it, people don't steal as much. In places where punishment for crimes is severe, and police are effective, crime rates are low. Japan being a great example.
I'm not sure why criticizing politicians who are weaponizing homeless populations against local residents to sway public opinion is lacking empathy. If anything, it's dignifying them as people who should not be used as pawns for a political agenda.
We just started planning our transition, as well. This was handled so poorly I can't imagine anyone would ever plan to start a new project on their platform.
Oh, sorry, I thought the comment was about how the transition was handled poorly. I’m well aware of the slow-motion train crash that is the Heroku incident!
Except no one has been able to come to any consensus on what "disinformation" is and isn't. For most, "disinformation" means "doesn't support my political narrative". Sure, there's extreme cases that are obvious, but the recent big tech censorship scandals have proven that no one has been able to draw the line correctly.
Tangential, but, at least in Europe, the Earth was widely believed to be spherical since ancient Greece, and Columbus relied on that, both for navigation and path-finding - traveling west on a flat Earth would not get him to India.
See, the problem is that we think and act like we're in a post-truth world, but we're not. Reality is out there. Certain statements correspond more closely with the reality that exists, and others less. Reality doesn't go away when you don't believe it, when it's outside your filter bubble, when it's censored by all the big social media outfits. And building a society that is based on something contrary to reality is... let's call it "probably unstable".
In a post-truth world, actual reality is out there, but parties can't come to an agreement about what that reality is. Reality exists, but truth does not.
> And building a society that is based on something contrary to reality is... let's call it "probably unstable".
It doesn't matter if it's unstable, so long as your side wins.
This may be a definition thing. Some statements that correspond more closely to reality. I call those statements "more true".
It sounds like your definition of "true" is more like "what we all agree on". I don't like that definition, because it means that things can go from "true" to "not true" and back to "true", as the consensus changes. I find that disconcerting, because that isn't how I think about truth. (Note well: I am not saying that your definition is wrong, merely that it doesn't match how I think about truth.)
But I think we can agree on this: Those who care about reality and those who care about winning consensus are talking about completely different things.
To me, "post-truth" is more an acknowledgement of a state of affairs where multiple parties stake irreconcilable and immutable claims on what is true.
The truth may be obvious to you, but what if there is someone who asserts an incompatible view they claim is the truth? Even if one view is objectively correct, if those who hold the objectively incorrect view steadfastly maintain that is the truth, you're still stuck.
> Those who care about reality and those who care about winning consensus are talking about completely different things.
Sure, but even winning consensus isn't important if you can suppress the opposition and impose your will.
If you're in Russia and you know what's actually happening in Ukraine, it doesn't do you a damn bit of good because Putin's "truth" trumps all others.
Actual reality and Truth are the same thing. Because two parties cannot agree on what they perceive the Truth to be does not imply it doesn't exist. In fact, both parties could be wrong - Truth could be a 3rd thing both are oblivious to.
> In a post-truth world, there's no shared reality, and we can't talk to each other. We can only shout our own truth louder.
Well said. Thank you for succinctly capturing what frustrates me so much about current politics.
My personal test, which helps with personal interactions at least, is that I distrust whoever turns to anger and shouting when discussing politics. I have a lot of pent up frustration towards relatives who will express political opinions, but one or two careful questions will lead them to angry grunts of "I don't know!" and "just forget it".
As participants in online discussions, especially in more serious forums like HN, we are accustomed to making logical arguments and then having those arguments challenged. We're a small subset of the total population though, and it seems that most people are incapable of calm and logical debate without quickly turning to anger and shouting.
I don't know what to do except vote, hope the collective intelligence serves us well, and that we don't have a civil war.
What I've come to appreciate is that freedom of association is a prerequisite of freedom of speech.
You can't meaningfully exercise freedom of speech when shouted down by a mob or drowned out by a megaphone. The power to form associations which exclude those who won't give you a chance to be heard is fundamental.
There was a "truth world" when interconnectivity between average people was low and narratives were controlled by a select few that dominated or had influence over the media. Now that there's more edges in the graph due to social media and the internet, there's more competition of narratives and we're seeing the social effects of that.
The correctness of the historical record is consensus driven since none of us were there; those experts had people around them providing signal through the noise. The outcome runs contrary to past story but achieving the outcome relies on consensus the new work was viable as a replacement.
Einstein did not start by defining numbers himself. He relied on consensus that our number system to that point was correct.
If you have some fancy notion that’s contrary to one that exists, do share. But also consider it’s consensus based social truth to even allow such ideation rather than subjugate everyone in to the mines.
It’s consensus that gives rise to big rockets and internet.
No hermit of a mountain man has ever changed the world. There was always consensus such efforts be enabled.
I highly recommend Notion for building a knowledge base at your organization. We have one section dedicated to company-wide knowledge, and another section dedicated to various tasks. Any recurring task should be documented fully, with screenshots or a screen recording. The upfront time investment of doing this allows you to really let go of the burdensome stuff. For any work that isn't creative or specialized, you really shouldn't do it yourself longer than it takes to document and delegate it.
Once you've got the workflow in place, finding an assistant is really just a process of elimination. You can easily find someone with C1 English skills for less than $10/hour on Upwork.
You'll need to filter through a bunch of bad ones to get to a good one, but again, this is an upfront time investment. Establish expectations early and fire quickly at the first sign of issues. Trying to "make it work" is worse than accidentally losing a good candidate.
I would also encourage you to post it as a full-time position, as you don't want to be competing with other clients (you still will, but if you're their primary professional focus that pays the rent, you won't lose out in most deadline situations).
I don't think there's enough investigative power to find all the people who were abusing the system. The level of fraud that I personally witnessed of people filing hundreds of PPP loans for non-existent businesses was in the high 7-figure range, and that was just 2 guys I happened to hear of. There were likely hundreds of scammers doing the same thing in every major city, each stealing millions of dollars each.
It should be possible to identify these people very easily with a SQL query. To qualify, a business had to have been running for some time (years) and have payroll. So run a query for "loans issued to entities with banking history < 1y and w-2 withholding payments == 0".
You are absolutely correct from a theoretical standpoint. Completely neutral, independent medical experts should, on average, make better health decisions than an uninformed populace.
The problem is when we transfer those assumptions to the real world, all of the most important adjectives in that prior sentence start to fall apart. The managers in the CDC are not neutral or independent. They are by and large bureaucrats who have professional reputations, career trajectory, office politics, and other competing incentives that compete and often conflict with their stated goal of making the "best health decisions" for everyone.
This has resulted in the absurd patchwork of logically inconsistent mask and vaccine rules that we've all be subjected to for the past 2 years. For me, this has firmly demonstrated that the structure of these institutions and their methods of public communication have lost the public trust and we cannot give them broad, sweeping powers.
If your concern is a patchwork of local rules, that isn’t on the CDC they set consistent national rules.
If your concern is changing rules over time that seems more optimal than maintaining the most draconian rules both from a freedom standpoint and a public health one. Essentially you want enough exposure to push herd immunity or lockdown never ends, but not excessive exposure or the health system collapses. If you track the number of people in hospitals over time especially in terms of local hotspots it explains the CDC’s behavior quite well.
I don't think the most perverse behavior we've seen in the CDC has a been a result of political pressure from the executive branch. They seemed to be fairly effective at maneuvering around the Trump administration's attempts to influence their policy. Like most people, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was on the "better safe than sorry" side of things and was generally supportive of their recommendations.
Some of the rules have never made much sense, particularly in regards to masking in restaurants and who was going to have to enforce those rules, but also the insistence on vaccine mandates that filtered down in very logically inconsistent ways to the local level. In an effort to prevent anti-vax conspiracy theorists from having a thread to pull on, they maintained public messaging that was borderline deceitful about the efficacy of the vaccine in preventing reinfection and encouraged ridiculous local regulations like showing vaccine cards to enter establishments. This mirrored the deceitful nature of the "only medical staff need masks" messaging at the beginning of the pandemic to prevent a mask supply shortage.
The turning point for me was Omnicron, as it was very quickly apparent this was a distinct, new disease that had a different risk profile than previous variants. But for what appears to be face-saving measures, no guidance was updated and it took months for them to concede that there were other metrics more important than case counts.
The insistence of continually extending the federal travel mask mandate is a case in point: I don't know of anyone who believes that the loose paper and cloth masks worn by most of the general public (sometimes covering nose and mouth, more often not) are actually producing a substantial effect in reducing transmission in indoor spaces, and AFAIK it's well understood that anyone at high risk of serious infection is well protected with a properly fitted N95 mask, especially in a well ventilated space like an airplane. At no point has there been a focus on educating people on the efficacy of different types of masks, just a continual hammering of the "mask up" narrative, treating people as too stupid to understand the difference.
For what appears to be ass-covering behavior on their part, they have focused on maintaining a consistency of messaging that ignores new data and and discredits any opposing points of view, even from other qualified members of the medical community. They are more focused on projecting authority and consistency than honestly handling nuance and it's become pretty obvious that is not the key to building trusted institutions.
I'm not saying disband the CDC, tear down the building, and exile Fauci. I'm simply saying that we need to recognize that the approach that was taken here did not work correctly and has resulted in less institutional trust than we started with and that we need to learn from our mistakes.
I don’t disagree with much here. I’ll just offer that Michael Lewis’ recent reporting does seem to implicate a culture of political awareness that negatively impacts the organization’s ability to engage in effective leadership.
