Extremely anecdotal: my dad’s lung cancer was found incidentally - shoulder pain → shoulder MRI → radiologist noticed lung nodules. The shoulder pain was unrelated, but the scan itself was clinically indicated and there were prior scans to compare against, which made it immediately suspicious and triggered follow-up imaging.
He was also in a higher-risk group (age + history), which in hindsight probably made the incidental finding meaningful rather than noise.
So cases like his make me think less “scan everyone periodically” and more “imaging can be very valuable once risk is non-trivial or there’s a baseline to compare to”. For the general population you’d mostly generate false positives, but for higher-risk groups (older, smokers, prior findings) it seems much more defensible.
Wrt the issue at hand: yes the cancer was found as an incidental finding on a scan performed for another indication (shoulder pain) -> the question remains whether your father benefitted from finding the cancer. This is seldomly the case.
Anecdotally, everything is possible but on a population scale, actual survival benefit is rare - whereas suffering from the downsides is not - even if only counting unnecessary healthcare cost and time wasted.
In my dad’s case it very likely did - it was lung cancer and still pre-symptomatic, but had already started to metastasize, so a later discovery would probably have meant a much worse prognosis category.
I agree anecdotes don’t generalize and broad population screening sounds like a bad tradeoff.
What I’m wondering about instead is risk-stratified situations: once someone already has elevated risk or prior lung disease and you’re imaging them periodically for legitimate reasons, incidental findings may carry much more signal than noise.
For example, people with prior tuberculosis often get periodic chest X-rays, not to screen the general population, but because their baseline risk is different. My dad had prior lung disease and existing imaging to compare against, which probably made the finding actionable rather than just another false positive.
So not “scan everyone”, more “the usefulness of incidental findings rises quickly once pre-test probability isn’t tiny”.
> [The Queen] granted her charter to their corporation named Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies.[15] For a period of fifteen years, the charter awarded the company a monopoly[26] on English trade with all countries east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.[27] Any traders there without a licence from the company were liable to forfeiture of their ships and cargo (half of which would go to the Crown and half to the company), as well as imprisonment at the "royal pleasure".[28]
The government didn't tell them to kill or enslave people, they did that on their own since that was more profitable than not doing it. The government then stepped in and forced them to stop killing and enslaving, which made the world a better place, today we don't have many companies that kill or enslave thanks to governments.
Do you want someone to add up the gov’t direct death tolls so we can compare?
Just off the top of my head; holodomir, the Great Leap Forward, the holocaust, the Khmer Rouge are at least 10x the East India companies death toll. We should probably add in war casualties too - at a minimum WW1 and WW2. I think I could list off probably 10 more with about 5 more minutes of work.
People can be terrible. More direct power usually means more terrible.
Gov’ts usually have the most direct power.
East India company was an odd case because they were granted defacto delegated gov’t power over a region that was full of ‘others’.
Slavery isn't profitable, people do it for emotional or ideological reasons, or because they're not competent enough to run a business that has to actually trade.
This is literally why economics is called "the dismal science". Slaveowners called economists that when the economists told them to stop doing slavery.
No, it is very much the other way around. Government is itself a monopoly, and has historically been justified by the intention to mitigate the "war of all against all" that emerges from chaotic competition between divergent factions in a raw state of nature.
But the modern status quo is so massively skewed toward government that the benefits from mitigating the worst cases of competition are vastly eclipsed by the detriments of monopolistic centralization.
Modern governments are a democratic monopoly. Corporations aren't democratic, if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
So we shouldn't cheer on private corporations that developers technology that could allow them to replace the government, that is really really scary if they actually succeeds in doing it.
The fact that governments used contrived symbolic rituals to get arbitrary subsets of arbitrary aggregations of people to express nominal approval of their behavior does nothing whatsoever to alter either the empirical nature or the ethical implicatoins of its monopoly.
> Corporations aren't democratic
Good -- this means that it's harder for them to appeal to vague symbolism to convince people that their actions are inherently legitimate, which in turn means that they are under greater scrutiny to justify their actions, each on its own merits.
> if a corporation gets powerful enough to overthrow the government and replace them you will be in much worse hands than if the current democratic government could remain in power.
Large vested interests are already extremely adept at co-opting nominally "democratic" government and using the very monopoly you're trying to justify as a way of obtaining top-down power that they'd never be able to acquire on their own -- they have zero interest in overthrowing anything.
Regulatory capture is the principal mechanism of corruption in the modern world, and it's astonishing to me that people keep arguing for expanding the reach of the regulatory state in order to reduce the dominance of large corporations, when the actual effect is always to amplify it.
Monopoly is the byproduct of allowing centralized power, not the natural state. I'm not actually sure how we could narrow down the natural state of humans at this point, but I strongly suspect it wouldn't be based on an assumption that people are willing to give up a growing list of individual freedoms in the name of fear.
Stopping the accumulation of power requires aggressive sacrifice from the less powerful.
This isn’t a feature of humans, but basic system dynamics / economics / etc.
A group gets more power and leverage that power to gain more power. Inevitable. Coordinated action is the only way to prevent it. And coordinated action is government.
Stopping accumulation of power is very hard when you have no accumulated power. I’m not sure how you could possibly believe otherwise unless you’re one of those believers in magical harmonious anarchy
So when you have $10 and your neighbor has $200 in whatever assets or currency your little community needs, and your neighbor decides to invest it, you’re gonna what, attack him? Gather your other neighbors and demand he share?
Well except that it definitely has. From more than 50 million people in pre-colonial times to less than 3 million in the 90s. USA has done genocide on a scale similar any other ethnic cleansing or to any communist regime.
USA didn't exist pre-colonial times, it started as a colony. Do you mean the British Empire? That one did way worse, yeah, but USA isn't the British Empire.
One thing to consider: Germany has a rapidly aging population so it naturally gets more unlikely to fund and get success with new technology. Imagine trying to develop some shiny new app in a country where over a quarter of the population is 60+ and most people refuse to pay cashless let alone accept any other new tech.
I may be an extreme outliar, but these numbers seem quite low to me?
The highest salaries listed there were about 30-40% lower than my new grad salary.
Granted it’s an offer for an american big tech company, but even many of my peers with less than stellar CV’s did better than the data shows.
US big-tech definitely skew the statistics and don't really represent the norm in EU/Germany. Traditional German (tech) companies, not just IT, pay piss poor salaries in comparison to the US ones in EU.
I do agree but American big tech does hire quite a bit here, no? Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe. And many other big tech companies aswell, especially since fully remote jobs becoming way more common.
>Amazon, google, msft, meta all have fairly big offices all over Europe
Yeah but what is the percentage of EU devs working at FAANG EU offices from the total number of devs in Europe? <1%?
I think you might be living in bubble if you assume everyone is making bank because FAANG have a couple of offices in the EU (most are in UK/CH which aren't in the EU)
>fully remote jobs becoming way more common
Fully remote jobs aren't common at all where I live (Austria) and have many negative consequences since you have to be self employed as a contractor, so you pay more taxes while missing out on pension, PTO, sick leave, parental leave, and other such benefits normally guaranteed by law for employees.
So the command to display the actual image is an argument of the cli. If you use kitty, u can simply use kitty’s internal utility function ‘icat’ to display images. So you simply add these lines to ur bashrc: ‘’’ terminalmuseum --command "kitty +kitten icat" --print_title ‘’’ If your terminal can’t display images the next best alternative is to use imgcat. In this case u need to install imgcat and then replace the command argument with “imgcat”.
So the answer is I use nothing to display images, as the user provides the command for it and I just run it.
He was also in a higher-risk group (age + history), which in hindsight probably made the incidental finding meaningful rather than noise.
So cases like his make me think less “scan everyone periodically” and more “imaging can be very valuable once risk is non-trivial or there’s a baseline to compare to”. For the general population you’d mostly generate false positives, but for higher-risk groups (older, smokers, prior findings) it seems much more defensible.