Both production of #Pine64 devices, and shipping of anything they ship with batteries, will be severely delayed by public health measures responding to the coronavirus outbreak.
"I have a suspicion that the extent of this disturbance will be felt across the entire electronics industry for the rest of the year."
- #LukaszErecinski
https://www.pine64.org/2020/02/15/february-update-post-cny-and-fosdem-status-report/
How 3'500 years old superstitions* kill 21st century supply chains 😂
* outbreak of Covid-19 is now attributed to transmission from bats to pangolins and then to humans, all of which contacted in absolutely appalling conditions on illegal marketplaces selling poached animals for traditional Chinese medicine
@kravietz it seems unlikely that the virus outbreak was related to health superstition, since that usually involves processing the animals into a highly refined form (eg a powder), which makes virus transmission much less likely. My understanding is that the vector was wildlife being sold live, as food.
@strypey Sure, here's the original article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00364-2
I imagine the people involved in manufacturing these "remedies" would prefer to buy their "ingredients" fresh, which would explain why alive or freshly slaughtered bats and pangolins could be found in vicinity.
@kravietz People using opiates as "medicine" don't usually want their ingredients fresh. My observations of Chinese traditional remedies is that they're sold as preparations in pharmacies, in some cases in the same ones that sell over-the-counter western remedies. That said, I guess the people who make the packaged preparations have to buy their ingredients somewhere, including the people making dodgy animal-based ones ;)
@strypey That's precisely what I mean. There's the whole supply chain, including poachers, contrabandists, "pharmacists" etc.
@kravietz Are you saying you blame legitimate Chinese pharmacists for the activities of black market snake oil salespeople? That's about as logical as blaming US pharmacists for crack and bath salts.
@kravietz the vast majority of TCM remedies are entirely plant-based, and unlike western med, medicines are a very small and supplemental part,of the care system. Preparations made from endangered species are illegal, and have a completely separate black market supply chain.
@strypey Were these animal-based remedies invented yesterday? I don't think so, most likely they are part of the overall codex of TCM so you could ask why be so selective, if you're believing in it at all? If these ingredients became illegal only recently, then the TCM makers who still use them are kind of right, at least within the logic of their belief system.
@kravietz western med used to include bloodletting. More recently, it gave bored housewives addictive tranquilizers for anxiety, and treated homosexuality as a disease. Medical traditions evolve, in response to both new empirical evidence and changes in social norms. There's a word for the assumption that only European traditions can do this, and it's not "skeptical" :/
@kravietz
"Many in the TCM community have tried to dissuade the uses of animal-based remedies. In 1993 rhino horn and tiger bone were removed from the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia, and in 2010 the World Federation of Chinese Medical Societies released a statement urging members not to use tiger bone or any other parts from endangered species."
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reference/traditional-chinese-medicine/
I'm not singling out China. Superstitions are stupid everywhere and I'm criticising "traditional medicine" everywhere, including my home country of Poland(*), Germany(**) or India(***), because it does more harm than good.
* some local shaman in PL recently starved a kid to death as part of "therapy"
** DE loves homeopathy and other "natural therapies", and are often abandoning cancer therapy and die
*** many ayurvedic drugs are simply poisonous and harmful to patients
The whole problem with "traditional medicine" communities is that they simply ignore what they don't like.
Any change in TCM or similar guidelines in Europe results in a group who splits from the mainstream (if there's one at all) and says "we're the *truly* traditional" and just continue doing what they did.
I could rant for hours about utter stupidity and contradictions of the homeopathy system here in EU but it's just not worth it.
Also, there's no such thing as "Western medicine". There's just "medicine" and it's the same globally. Chinese researchers have huge share in it - if you look at PubMed, plenty of articles are from universities in China.
Everywhere in the world, including Europe and China, there are groups of people who chose to stick to some long-disproved theories, usually for financial gain.
@kravietz you got a reference for that? There's a lot of theories doing the rounds. My understanding is that the market itself was legal (old school farmers markets are still common in China), although those selling wildlife for consumption there may have been breaking the law, depending on the animals involved.