All of scottleibrand's Comments + Replies

What is the source for the claim that “Currently, the US has banned over-the-counter myopia glasses”? Glasses for mild myopia (up to about -4.0) are available without a prescription on Amazon (https://a.co/d/04RQUEk8 is the kind I wear when I take my contacts out), and AFAICT that is perfectly legal. AFAIK prescription lenses are only required for correcting more complex or multiple refractory problems like myopia+astigmatism, or myopia+presbyopia.

It seems like a highly neglected intervention to simply provide free myopia glasses in developing countries wi... (read more)

I think the relevance of Starlink here is not for serving individuals in LMICs, but for providing backhaul for towers in places too remote to easily backhaul via fiber or line of sight microwave links.

I don't expect the outbreak to continue indefinitely in the US, Europe, or East Asia. As noted at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bending-curve-covid-19-how-avoid-being-wuhan-lombardy-scott-leibrand/ , we are likely to need to implement 50-75% social distancing in order to avoid overloading ICU capacity, and at that point we've also basically stopped growth in new cases, making it comparatively easy to keep doing more of the same until new cases start to noticeably shrink, as they did in China, Singapore, and now Korea. The real question to me is ... (read more)

Even if you want to eliminate the economic value of life and only consider their moral value, you still need to consider the economic value of avoiding hospitalization, which is about $100/day. It's highly unlikely that buying malaria nets is higher value than actions you can take that will meaningfully contribute to overwhelming an expensive hospital system.

I just went ahead and edited this post to include the full text.

This is my first time posting here, so not sure of all the protocols: if it'd be better to duplicate the content here rather than linking to the LinkedIn post, I'm happy to move it over.