That's why we have already exhausted all major pathways for drug mechanisms.
That's not true there's research like Zampaloni et al 2024 that proposes new antibiotic classes.
What did we learn? We have almost all of human history to look back at, but we don't care.
We do care. We care so much that we essentially made the development of new antibiotics commercially unviable. Companies that managed to bring new antibiotics to market like Achaogen, Tetraphase, Nabriva Therapeutics and Melinta Therapeutics all failed commercially.
We do fund the research of people like Zampaloni but we make rules that prevent companies for selling newly developed antibiotics to people who want to buy them and therefore BioTech companies and Big Pharma has little incentive to translate research findings such as that of Zampaloni et al into a commercial products. They don't want to suffer the same fate as Achaogen, Tetraphase, Nabriva Therapeutics and Melinta Therapeutics.
This is similar to COVID-19 an example where experts do care a lot about the problem but then make bad policy. The reason "I'm a researcher, I know about a problem, so the solution should be more research on the problem", even if it would take something else.
1since it’s the only decision you make that could have infinite impact
No, if you assume that there's might be a god that rewards certain choices with infinite impact, that god could chose to reward all sorts of different choices with infinite impact. The set of rules that various religions propose is not the total set of rules that a god might use to make his judgements.
In practice, it's all a matter of trade negotiations. Trade deals specify on what grounds countries can pass goods from being sold. Plenty of trade agreements then have clauses for Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement to enforce what was negotiated which reduces countries sovereignty to just do what they want.
Trump did get the EU to allow US goods to be sold that were previously blocked form being sold because of regulation like car safety regulation.
EU's rules are quite complex. The general rule is in Article 34 of the TFEU:
Quantitative restrictions on imports and all measures having equivalent effect shall be prohibited between Member States.
Article 36 TFEU than says:
The provisions of Articles 34 and 35 shall not preclude prohibitions or restrictions on imports, exports or goods in transit justified on grounds of public morality, public policy or public security; the protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants; the protection of national treasures possessing artistic, historic or archaeological value; or the protection of industrial and commercial property. Such prohibitions or restrictions shall not, however, constitute a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade between Member States.
Then there are plenty of more specific EU directives ChatGPT lists Regulation 2019/515 and Directive 1999/74/EC as mattering to the egg question.
Isn't there an obvious solution to that: allow only early-screened eggs to be sold in Germany, no matter where they came from?
That violates the rules of a common market which is the core of what the EU is about. This is the logic why Dominic Cummings considered Brexit to be the obvious solution.
Recently, the Trump administration was arguing that some EU rules for things like car safety block US cars to be sold in Europe so as part of his tariff threads he pushed through rules so that now cars that EU rules used to consider to be unsafe to be sold. Trade agreements limits how countries can limit what's sold in them and the common free market is a trade agreement that everything can be sold everywhere in the EU.
French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage.
I think when you look at it you will find that French films are not a major source of competition for German cinema. Even with French subsidies, German don't focus on watching French films. If anything the are watching films from Hollywood.
Better housing policies in Poland?
Everyone wants better policies, the key question is what policies are actually better. If Poland for example allows housing to be build with less concern for parking spaces than Germany which results in cheaper housing, the cost of having less parking space is born by the Polish citizens that live near that housing that could be constructed with less parking spaces.
Having people be able to trade off availability of parking spaces vs. cheaper rent in different local jurisdiction makes a lot of sense as the relevant costs are born by the local population.
The same goes for playground construction. If Berlin wants to require people who build a house to construct playgrounds and Warsaw doesn't and that leads to lower rent in Warsaw, that's a matter of local preferences and it doesn't make sense to decide on requirements for playground construction on the EU level.
As citizen of Berlin, I would like lower rents, less parking spaces and less playground construction requirements, but I think it's reasonable to make that decision on the state level (Berlin is both city and a state within Germany).
That's different than many aspects of farming policy, where it's not about benefits that are accrued locally.
But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something.
In the EU states and lower level institutions compete on plenty, that's not a good argument to make if you want to criticize the status quo.
What I write about egg shredding is of positions hold a few years ago, but it illustrates the principle:
In Germany, we don't really like to throw little baby chickens in the shredder. If Germany would be completely on it's own we would require eggs to screened early to prevent it from happening, even if that means that our eggs are a few cents more expensive. However, we are living next to Poland. If we would require eggs produced in Germany to do more egg screening and then cheaper Polish eggs outcompete the German eggs in our supermarkets we don't want that. A common market means that we can't simply forbid Polish eggs, so there's a need for a shared agricultural policy that somehow brings the different ideas about how eggs should be produced together.
If one country decides to increase subsidies for apples and then outcompetes other European countries for apples or creates pressures for them also to add apple subsidies to protect their apple growers that isn't great either.
If you have a common market common agricultural policy does make some sense.
Can you imagine a similar piece about disagreements between the EPP and ALDE? And have you, by the way, even heard those acronyms?
Yes, they are European political parties, but hardly anyone has heard of them.
They are not political parties, they are political groups. It's like how caucus in the US Congress where an independent can be together Democratic members in one caucus.
The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.
Calling the decisions of member states apolitical is wrong. They are all political appointments. It's not like for example the British system where you have a private secretary appointed to a minister that's an apolitical appointment.
1The government has also been making improvements like adding fencing, and you could probably fence the whole thing for under $100M [3].
While this would solve the problem of deaths it would also harm people by increasing travel times. The article suggests that some people cross the tracks because otherwise they would have to work 10 minutes more to work. It easy to do a lot of harm with safety interventions as well.
A superintelligence would likely interact with a large part of the world via a browser. Building a browser that works well with their AI, seems to me like it helps developing an AI that can do task in the real world.
It also provides a lot of training data of AI acting as an agent that can be valuable for building superintelligence.
A key problem is that the responsibility for the problem is separated over multiple different stakeholders that all matter.
In your example, it sounds like the main problem is with the facility management that doesn't seem to consider printers as something that they should organize in a sensible way.
When it comes to printing, many times I want to print, I don't really want to get a piece of paper but want to send a letter. Software like Google Docs could just give me a "send a letter" and "send a fax" button and let me pay for the service.