If you remember Windows Phone 8, it has already been tried and nobody (ahem, no company) wanted that.
No company is stupid enough to give up their content and infra and get none of the screen real estate.
I can see a parallel with hotels and OTAs, but in that case appearing on an OTA brings in sales. Showing $userA's content on $userB's screen won't earn any money from $company.
It's essentially impossible to write a traditional program that can go through the full process of logging in and changing a password autonomously, without writing fragile site-specific procedures.
That's because phone browsers have the insane braindead default of scaling everything into tiny unreadableness. You have to explicitly say "stupid browser, nobody ever wanted this shit, behave sensibly by including <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">. No idea why this idiotic custom still hasn't been purged from mobile browsers, but I guess it's just a valuable tradition now...
Before mobile browsers arrived, everything was fine and nobody needed meta viewport stuff. That's why this 1997 era page doesn't have it.
They did - their list wasn’t all related to _your_ post, other than to say the site is “perfect” to them, after which they enumerated the reasons including “does not require JavaScript”
Herpes viruses like HSV are notoriously difficult to target with medication bc they encode themselves into DNA inside the nuclei of long-lived human nerve cells. Between outbreaks, they basically exist only as rogue DNA floating inside mostly-healthy cells in the nerve ganglia. At some point, something triggers the nerve cell to transcribe the rogue DNA, producing new viruses and beginning a new outbreak.
IM-250 (Adibelivir) is a helicase-primase inhibitor that targets latent HSV so well it may actually permanently reduce the pool of viable latent HSV genomes.
Nope - because it can not target the genome. So it is, by definition, not a permanent reduction. Any inhibitor is a protein; unless such a protein modifies the DNA, one only cures a symptom, not the cause, by definition. HAART with regards to the HI virus has a similar problem.
Note that even on commercial sites they point this out:
"Adibelivir (IM-250) is an orally active helicase-primase inhibitor. Adibelivir is effective against HSV infection and reduces reactivation of latent HSV."
See the word "reduces". Nowhere does it insinuate "permanently"; besides, permanently is simply a misnomer here. Even "latent" is a misnomer; it simply is integrated DNA. The only way to get rid of it is to cut this DNA out. Which therapeutic does so with efficiency? Even CRISPR-Cas9 has off-target effects. There are no permanent cures, and insinuating otherwise by using "permanently", is simply and factually incorrect.
This causes PML-NB formation → more viral genomes with H3K9me3 + ATRX → resists eviction by the H3K9me3S10ph “methyl/phospho switch” →
stops Phase I HSV transcription (and VP16 expression).
Who’s to say an HPI like IM-250 isn’t altering epigenetic markers in viral episomes in this way? Innovative Molecules’ own press release states that some sort of permanent or semi-permanent modification may take place:
>Furthermore, testing in animal models showed that adibelivir affected the latent viral reservoir, suggesting that it has potential as a long-term curative therapy for HSV.
It's estimated that 300 million people have HBV. HBV is currently incurable once acquired, at which point the vaccine is irrelevant.
The HBV virus is also carcinogenic, which makes it unique[0] among the three big hepatitis viruses. Liver cancer is extremely aggressive and fast-killing, often reaching terminal stages before it is even detectable at all. It is one of the top three causes of cancer deaths worldwide.
Aside from the sheer number of people affected by this, it is also a horrible thing to experience. I have watched someone die from liver cancer, and I would not wish it on anyone.
Contrast to HSV, which is widespread (approximately half the population has at least one HSV latent infection) and causes very few problems beyond occasional irritation in virtually all cases that do not involve other comorbidities or immunocompromised status. HSV is also suppressible through antiviral treatment, making it generally untransmittable (if treated and suppressed) and unlikely to cause symptoms. Most people with HSV do not even bother to do this, which is if anything a testament to how little HSV affects their lives (most don't even know they have it, and there is no clinical justification for routine testing in otherwise healthy patients).
Of all infections pathogens for which I could wish a cure into existence, HSV would be extremely low on my list.
[0] While HCV can cause cancer if left untreated for a long time and if it causes cirrhosis, approximately one third of people clear HCV infection in the acute stages without any lasting ill effect. Of the remainder, it takes a long time for cirrhosis to develop, leaving plenty of time for treatment. First-line treatments are approximately 95-99% effective. So there is no clinical reason HCV needs to increase a person's risk for cancer, as long as they have access to medical care. The same is not true for HBV.
Yep — if this is properly verified it means HSV is one of the most consequential virus families in public health.
For the same reason we should be hoping for a treatment that can rid the body of VZV (chickenpox/shingles) because it is absolutely clear that the shingles vaccine has some protective effect against dementia.
First, while you're correct that most people who have HSV have few symptoms (if any), you're discounting the fact that, because so many people are infected, there are millions upon millions who have highly-visible and highly-painful infections. Many of these people struggle with relationships and mental health as a result.
Second, HSV is associated with higher risk of HIV infection for obvious reasons.
Finally, discovering effective treatments for such a difficult virus would probably produce insights that have implications for other difficult-to-target viruses.
So I don't think we should dismiss HSV on the basis that it's so common and doesn't cause life-threatening symptoms. Medicine should pay adequate attention to infections that affect quality of life for large numbers of people.
Billions are spent on treatments for super rare diseases, many of which are terminal, and in the best cases the end result is often that pharmaceutical companies have drugs costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars that extend life by months (often with dubious quality of life).
Yeah HSV on its own would be awesome to find a good vaccine for but the insights it would give for vaccinations against the broader human herpes virus family would be massively impactful.
A successful HSV vaccine would also almost certainly lead to a vaccine for epstein-barr, cytomegalovirus, and roseolovirus.
Even ignoring the thousands of connections HSV is suspected to have to other diseases, getting insight towards the other 3 big "uncured" HHVs would be a massive deal.
EBV/mono is a silent but debilitating disease that infects a near majority of the population even in "developed countries" and is all but confirmed as a requirement for developing multiple sclerosis. EBV is also directly connected to a long list of cancers as well.
cytomegalovirus and roseolovirus while less common in the developed world are still far too common and globally are major sources of harm for infants and young children.
Any steps towards effective vaccination against the broader family of HHVs would be monumental.
I don't have any sort of HSV infection (that I'm aware of) but I subscribe to this subreddit and check on it every month or so:
www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/
It's interesting seeing what's going on in that field, and seeing how much effort afflicted people put into tracking possible treatments and cures.
From my reading it appears that there are many promising treatments in the pipeline with some of thek already available through official/unofficial means.
Ive been subscribed there for many years - progress is vanishingly slow. It has sped up since the alzheimers research cabal got busted up and it has become clearer that HSV is a very large contributor to dementia.
> Yes, there is an effective vaccine but not everyone has access to it for tons of reasons.
Also, about 3.5% of the world's population already has it. That's about 300 million people for whom a vaccine is pointless, and who are at dramatically higher risk of liver cancer (somewhere between 15-50% lifetime risk of an extremely deadly type of cancer), and for whom a cure would literally be life-changing, if available.
> The HB vaccine unfortunately doesn't work that well, many people are still not fully immune even after several doses
This is incorrect. The HBV vaccine is one of the most effective vaccines available for any pathogen, providing full immunity to over 95% of healthy infants, children, and young adults, and with that immunity typical lasting for at least 30 years (and likely for life).
If someone is one of the rare exception, tthat's easy to detect with blood titers, and the response is either to give them additional doses or to deliver an adjuvanted version (which is the same thing regularly done for other vaccines which are either less effective or primarily targeted at the elderly, who have weaker immune responses).
I work in healthcare. As a requirement for employment, I had to get tested for immunity to HBV. Even though I got the vaccine as is generally recommended for everyone, the test says I'm not immue. So now I have to get 3 additional doses, and apparently even with that it's not guaranteed sufficient for full immunity. And I know my case is not unusual at all
One 20 is not unusual. That said, that does not mean that the vaccine is not effective at being a vaccine. A vaccine isnt just about your immunity, but about herd immunity. When you create an inability for a virus to spread among the herd, you protect those who are unable to acquire immunity by inhibiting the viruses ability to move between hosts and persist in a population.
Vaccines are not 100% effective for each individual.
You are confusing it with HPV (human papillomavirus). Hep B is a very different disease.
The first Hep B vaccine in the US is given to all infants within 24 hours of birth (unless the child is already positive for Hep B or severely underweight). And then the second vaccine a month or so later and the third between ages 6 and 18 months old. Hep B vaccination is one of the most common vaccinations received in the US.
And also as a fun little fact the first Hep B vaccine was given exclusively to gay men for a decent while until it was deemed safe enough for the general population. It was also manufactured from the blood of gay men and needle based drug users.
The Hep B vaccine that came later was recombinant and that one was given to everyone from day 1 and that's the vaccine that's been more or less the main Hep B vaccine in use up to today. Recently there's at least one new one that has been approved but the original recombinant Hep B vaccine is still regularly given.
So, assuming that you specifically latched on to the mention of HPV, which isn't even the same virus, "until recently" depends on the country and might mean 6-10 years ago in European countries or even as much as 15 years in other places.
The vaccines are not a prohibited drug and so in most places if you have full blown prescribing rights (e.g. a Doctor or most "Advanced Practitioner" roles) the prescriber can "go off-piste" and just prescribe anything they believe is appropriate. So it's wrong to say it wasn't "allowed".
What you're thinking off are vaccine recommendations which are shots you'll get badgered to do if you don't ask and those didn't include people assigned male at birth in many countries at first because the studies were about Cervical Cancer and obviously most people assigned male at birth do not have a cervix because that's quintessentially female anatomy [Mother Nature doesn't give a fuck, with billions of humans all kinds of weird edge cases arise]. Later studies checked that, as you might now expect, preventing HPV infection also avoids warts and other cancers induced by this virus, and thus impacts humans who don't have a cervix.
Certainly, it helps the architect to know the constraints of concrete and bricks, but you don’t really have to know every level of down to the chemistry.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
Sure there are. Both Mollie and Adyen are API-first. Mollie developer experience has always been on par with Stripe in my experience. And they existed 6 years earlier.
It’s the whole system. It takes many characteristics for something to happen in a specific manner.
Even the global empire of the USA extracting competent people from all over the globe, depriving the source countries of that talent, is one of the characteristics of this particular system. It is a double edged sword, in different ways, but one of those is that it not only deprives the vassal territories of the empire of its most competent people, it also undermines and sabotages the competent people of the empires own people because it’s easier, faster, more profitable. In many ways it’s a similar voracious and parasitic mindset of private equity using leveraged buyout type methods to extract everything and give/provide nothing, a parasitism.
So the founders are Irish, but the Irish or even European system was probably not ready to super something like Stripe for all the apparent and obscure reasons, and America was a good host for it for many apparent and obscure reasons all the same.
But that’s what this “American Empire” relies on in many ways, both extracting talent and capable “human resources” from its vassals and at the same time suppress its own people internally.
It’s why even all these years after slavery and continued “immigration” narrative that did the same to provide profits and support of a decadent lifestyle to the ruling class, we still import brown people in a different way for the same reason, while we also still import competent Europeans around the “immigration” propaganda story of the type that led to two Irish brother “immigrants” founding Stripe and not doing so in Europe.
It’s one of those things narcissistic systems are really good at doing, making you support it even against your own best interests, and then aggressively supporting and defending it doing so; usually because of some emotional delusion or a compromising benefit. For example, how could someone aspiring to achieve something like the Stripe protests not support “immigration” when they have dollars in their eyes? It’s not a coincidence that there is only an emoji with $ in its eyes, not any other currency .
And that’s only one tiny aspect of what you asked about. You have to free yourself of the narcissistic system that is Americas primary source of power if you want to change that or even understand it. It’s a conundrum, understanding enough and then being able to free oneself of the narcissistic system, all while the narcissistic system/people will try to lure you back into the narcissistic system they use to dominate people. One of the hardest aspects of that is being able to say “no” to one of the most powerful forces of a narcissistic system, flattery and facilitation.
Don’t you smart, good, wonderful, intelligent, saintly… far better than Americans… immigrants not also want to come to America to empower and enrich the American ruling class and thereby undermine and deprive your own societies and cultures??? Well come on in, America is open for business to enrich the American ruling class and expand its global empire with your help!!! Uncle Empire needs you!
Quite to the contrary: all a company is (at least as originally conceptualised) is the formalisation of a group of people, usually working together towards a shared goal. It’s in the name - just like you have a troupe of actors, you may have a company of engineers and accountants (though to keep in the vein of live stage production, you also have a theatre company).
This is why we tend to use collective pronouns when referring to a company - Meta just announced that theyare planing share dilution (though to weaken my own case, one can also use singular nouns, likely due to the increased modern perception of a company as a single entity due to the increased anonymity afforded by the internet)
This is why I love Apple's Hide My Email. I use it ALL the time and the unsubscribe button is always there. It's not the most polished interface, but it works perfectly.
Also, for any subscription for which I don't use HME, I will immediately "mark as spam" any minimally-spammy email I get. The ones described in the article would be insta-marked due to the lack of Unsubscribe button.
No company is stupid enough to give up their content and infra and get none of the screen real estate.
I can see a parallel with hotels and OTAs, but in that case appearing on an OTA brings in sales. Showing $userA's content on $userB's screen won't earn any money from $company.