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Month: March 2025

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

Covid at Five: Following the New Science

photo by testalize-me at unsplash

This month marked the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, and we thought it might be interesting and instructive to go over some of the developments since that time.

During the Covid Era, we were instructed to follow the science, and now that the novel mRNA vaccines have been out in the population for a while – in other words, studied over at least some time, which historically has been done before new vaccines are released to hundreds of millions of people, here are the results, and we’re just reporting, so don’t shoot the messenger: The Largest COVID-19 “Vaccine” Safety Study Ever Conducted, on 99 Million Individuals, Confirms the Injections Are NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN USE. We do realize that there was a pandemic afoot and lives at stake and the vaccine was rolled out for emergency use, but as Dr. Peter McCullough reported, In fact, 100-Year-Old BCG Vaccine Outperforms Novel mRNA Injections Against COVID-19.

““We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives,” says the headline on a New York Times piece that looks back at one of the deceptions promoted by government health officials during the Covid panic of 2020. The story appears in the opinion section but also notes that New York Times news reporting was subject to spin from what we might call the medical branch of the Beltway swamp,” said the Wall Street Journal. Read More...

AI and the Written Word

AI and the Written Word

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A subject matter expert friend of ours is being pressed ad nauseam to write a book, but his free time is in short supply. It has been suggested to him, again ad nauseam, to  have an LLM do it for him. The book would be generated in days!

Before deferring to a generative AI, some things to keep in mind: “AI Search Has A Citation Problem. We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News,” Columbia Journalism News reported.  “We found that…

• Chatbots were generally bad at declining to answer questions they couldn’t answer accurately, offering incorrect or speculative answers instead.
• Premium chatbots provided more confidently incorrect answers than their free counterparts.
• Multiple chatbots seemed to bypass Robot Exclusion Protocol preferences.
• Generative search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles.
• Content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation in chatbot responses. Read More...

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

Skype: Lessons Learned from a Dead Unicorn

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Om Malik wrote an amazing piece (Skype is dead. What happened?) on the demise of Skype and there are lessons to be learned here for founders – and investors.

At launch, Skype was a seminal technology that upended communications. Prior to the launch of the peer-to-peer network, long-distance calls were prohibitively expensive. Suddenly, one could call anywhere in the world for free, as one can do with so many services today – now, even video, of course. At one point, like Zoom, Skype was a verb.

As for the lessons: Read More...

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

The Startup/Investor Disconnect

Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

Startups are often put under the microscope when they go belly-up. The press is quick to do the forensics on what went wrong. What about the investors who put in the money? Where’s the scrutiny there? We’ve seen the bar raised for founders, but what about that other side of the table?

“Here’s the problem: this entire system optimizes for investor survival, not startup success,” said Paul O’Brien in a LinkedIn post. “A 90% startup failure rate? That’s not an inevitability…But no one in venture has an incentive to change. The funds get raised, the 2% management fees roll in, and the game continues. If investors actually cared about optimizing startup success, they’d be applying First Principles thinking, not just playing the same old VC lottery. They’d be using frameworks like the Bell Mason Diagnostic, which systematically assesses startups based on real, stage-appropriate criteria, rather than some partner’s gut feeling on whether the founder has “the right energy.”

“But most firms don’t do this because, why fix a system that already benefits them? Read More...