I bought a single-hose AC unit. I knew two-hose units existed, and that a two-hose design intuitively seems to be the way to go for good thermodynamic reasons, but I did it anyway. This was mostly, as I remember, for four reasons:
On the design side, while clearly it would be better not to suck warm air into the room if you don't have to, the engineers are up against competing problems:
As it was, my single-hose unit was bumping up against size, weight, cost, and noise limits. While it might be able to do more cooling per watt if given another hose, it might also then not meet other design constraints, and thus not actually solve my problem.
If we are facing a truly bad new variant, a vaccine update will not save us, because our Public Health Authorities have zero interest in finding a way to make the timeline work.
I'm, personally, quite interested in finding a way to make the timeline work. I'm also quite interested in making the timeline work for preventing infection with the current circulating variants. Then we can start on the common cold.
Is the plan around here to actually listen to the public health authorities on this? Or is something being organized to route around these sorts of regulatory failures? (For example, by manufacturing and distributing up-to-date vaccines within a state only, to keep them out of interstate commerce.) Nobody working on RaDVaC seems to have yet been arrested; maybe doing more of that and trying to make it more accessible to non-microbiologists would be more better?
Or is the potential gain in terms of coronavirus cases and deaths prevented by faster action not going to be worth the cost of annoying the relevant authorities, plus the cost of doing the actual work, plus the risk of doing it wrong?
One issue nobody has raised yet is the effects of structural racism.
The GWAS studies used to create the polygenic risk scores generally have a very pronounced sampling bias towards people of European ancestry. See for example the GWAS Diversity Monitor, which is a dashboard meant to monitor the sampling practices used by GWAS studies. In addition to selecting people to sample by ethnicity, an accepted practice is to look at the genomes after sampling and try to identify and exclude "ethnic outliers".
If you or your partner don't have ethnicities that would make your genomes look typical among the samples used to train the scoring algorithm, it's an open question whether any particular score instrument is going to be usefully predictive for you or your potential child. See for example Generalization and dilution of association results from European GWAS in populations of non-European ancestry: the PAGE study, which found that, while many GWAS hits generalize from a very restricted sample, a substantial fraction don't. See also Current clinical use of polygenic scores will risk exacerbating health disparities, which discusses polygenic risk scores in particular, and their accuracy falloff when used on people who the score developers would have excluded from their training set.
Note also that even the papers complaining about this problem are still breaking down their results by very abstract discrete dimensions like "5 continental populations", which sweep a lot of people under a very large rug. If you and your partner have different ethnicities, you get to be on the wrong end of fun lines like this one, from that last paper:
Related to stratification, most PRS methods do not explicitly address recent admixture and none consider recently admixed individuals’ unique local mosaic of ancestry; further methods development is needed.
I'm not convinced that it's not possible to design a program of drills that teach a useful response to the every-6000-year problem of "your school is under attack", without injuring the mental health of the students to the point where it isn't worth doing. (Whether it's then worth the time from the school day is another question, which depends on how or whether you value that time to begin with.)
Is there a similar problem with the mental health costs of fire, tornado, and earthquake drills being remarkably high? Having experienced those drills, and seeing the complaints about active shooter drills inflicting trauma, I'm left concluding that the active shooter drills are a fundamentally different kind of practice than other emergency drills. We could abolish them and book a net win, but maybe we could also make them like the other drills instead, and thus make them cost-effective to do, for an even greater benefit.
It could be the case that the other drills are similarly dangerous to mental health, but they have benefits that justify their costs, due to the other kinds of emergencies being more common. Or, it could be that none of the emergencies are worth the mental health costs of drilling for, but we just happen to be examining this one right now. Or, it could be that broadly comparable physical drill activities are much more damaging to one's mental health when one is told one is practicing for being attacked by a human, rather than a tornado, and the kids will figure it out no matter what kind of drill you claim it is, and there's no way to make an active shooter drill safe enough to do. Or it could be the case that nothing you could teach in a reasonably safe drill is going to be particularly effective in an actual attack.
But I don't buy Zvi's equivalence between anything one could describe as an "active shooter drill" and damaging children's mental health. All we know is that current practice appears to be damaging children's mental health.