Folamh3
User ID: 1175
I don't really see much of a meaningful distinction between "Covid was too infectious to be controlled" and "it is possible to control Covid, provided your country is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders and you keep your borders shut indefinitely". It's so telling that "zero Covid" types always fall back on the examples of Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that of course lockdowns work at controlling Covid (and it's just a complete coincidence that both countries are geogprahically isolated island nations without land borders). Show me an example of a country which isn't a geographically isolated island nation with land borders which was able to control Covid with vaccines and NPIs. I'm going to assume you can't. Given that most countries are not geographically isolated island nations without land borders, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that, for 90%+ of countries on earth, Covid is too infectious to be controlled.
And insofar as you're labelling the decision to reopen the Australian borders a "conservative" one, we both know full well that if Anthony Albanese (Labor party) had taken office a few months earlier, he would have made the same decision. In point of fact, Albanese did take office in May 2022, and did not immediately reverse the previous administration's decision to reopen the border. New Zealand reopened its borders a few months after Australia did, a decision made by a Labor prime minister (who was previously, consistently praised for her aggressive response to Covid and "girlboss" energy throughout the Anglosphere), and saw the same dramatic spike in Covid deaths. Are you just defining "conservative" policies as any policies which do not pursue the minimisation of Covid deaths as a terminal goal, at the expense of all other considerations? Or are you only interested in discussing the relative rates of Covid deaths when you can blame conservative decisions for them, and studiously ignoring progressive politicians who make almost identical decisions in almost identical circumstances?
If elderly lives are worth radically less, why does murdering someone in their 80s carry the same penalty?
I never said elderly lives are worth radically less. You claimed that Covid is more lethal than AIDS, but this is obviously untrue for the simple reason that it is much easier to kill a sick elderly person than a young healthy person.
it took a year just to work out that it was sexually transmitted, and you couldn't just post that information on a website because the internet didn't really exist
TIL the Internet was the first ever medium for disseminating medical information. In point of fact the CDC (among other bodies) ran massive nationwide campaigns throughout the 1980s intended to raise awareness of the disease and how to avoid catching it, as did various governmental bodies in the UK. There was a very brief window, only a few years, in which a person who'd contracted AIDS could legitimately plead ignorance and say they didn't now better.
With AIDS, avoiding it would have required not having any relationships for the next decade or two
Or, you know, wearing a condom.
With COVID, you were asked to wear a mask and avoid big parties for a few months.
Yes, we were asked to do that. But even getting massive buy-in from the public on both counts had virtually zero demonstrable impact on the rate of transmission of the virus. China was unable to control Covid even using vastly more punitive measures (like literally locking people inside their apartment buildings) than any Western government, even in 2022 after 90%+ of their adult population had been vaccinated. I mean, even in your preferred example of Australia, even while their borders were shut, people still died. Or are you claiming that Australia really could have gotten its Covid death rate down to zero if literally everyone had always worn a mask outside the home?
Failure to do so placed everyone around you at risk.
Well, no: it placed every old and immunocompromised person around you at risk. Most people are neither, and Covid poses little more threat to them than the flu.
Folamh3
8d ago
I've been watching Yahtzee's video reviews for a decade and a half, he's put me on to so many great games, but I've never read any of his fiction. Is it any good?
Folamh3
8d ago
When I was in secondary school, I bought Charles Burns's comic book Black Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_(comics)), a wonderfully trippy and surreal fusion of body horror, coming-of-age story and 70s nostalgia. It's over 350 pages long, but I found it so absorbing that I read the entire thing in one sitting of maybe 3-4 hours. I read it again maybe two years ago and found it just as good the second time, if not better.
I recently happened across his latest book Final Cut in a bookshop and snapped it up. Last night I read the first chapter. Man's still got it. It revisits a lot of the same motifs as Black Hole: I think it's set in the seventies or possibly the eighties, it's very dreamy and surreal and there's some body horror. But this time it's in colour. I'm sure I'll have devoured the whole thing before the end of the week.
Folamh3
9d ago
I remember this, the infamous "a car" which drove into a Christmas parade. Cars typically have drivers, don't they? Did a self-driving car experience a HAL-9000 moment?
Folamh3
10d ago
why doesn't this happen more often?
Gwern asked the same question years ago: https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
Folamh3
10d ago
Day 12 of NaNoWriMo, and I've just crossed the 20k mark. I'm really enjoying the whole process, I forgot how much fun it is to get into that creative flow state where the ideas are just pouring out of me.
My initial understanding of NaNoWriMo was that one had to write a complete novel of at least 50k words in the month of November. To that end, when mapping out the structure of the story in October, I'd envisioned it being made up of 5 "acts", each roughly 10k words. But of course, I quickly found that I had much more to say than that: act 1 is already 14k words and it isn't even finished yet, and at this rate a complete first draft will be more in the range of 70-80k words. Fortunately, the rules of NaNoWriMo stipulate that you can use the month to write a 50k-word novel or the first 50k words of a novel, so I'll still win the competition even if I don't have a finished first draft by December 1st.
2020, the year COVID hit: 906 deaths
2021: 1,355 deaths
2022, when the conservative government ended lockdowns: 10,301 deaths
Your comparison is hopelessly confounded by the fact that Australia, unlike the overwhelming majority of countries which enforced lockdowns, is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders, which has far more explanatory power in explaining the country's low rate of Covid deaths than does the strictness of their lockdowns. It's true that Australia ended lockdowns in 2022. It's also true that 2022 was the year the country first reopened its borders after Covid. I guess you could say that these are "deaths caused by a conservative policy" - but are you seriously proposing that Australia ought to have kept its borders shut to immigrants and tourists permanently? All to prevent a few thousand old people dying from Covid every year? A significant proportion of whom, if not an actual majority, would have died of flu or pneumonia within the period if Covid hadn't got them?
I don't think I've ever seen a source that listed less than 90% immunity from the vaccine - what exactly is your standard here?
The vaccines were very effective at preventing serious illness, but practically useless at preventing transmission. Users on this forum have been gaslit for years with politicians and representatives from the pharmaceutical industry claiming after the fact "we never said that the vaccines would prevent transmission!" but we were there and yes they did and we have receipts.
7 million Covid deaths in 4 years VS 42 million AIDS death in 40 years
Not a like with like comparison. By a very wide margin, the vast majority of people who died of AIDS were otherwise healthy adults or young adults between the ages of 15-49 (https://ourworldindata.org/hiv-aids). By contrast, 75% of people who died from Covid were aged 65+, and more than 50% were older than 75 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#SexAndAge). For a very high proportion of these people, if Covid hadn't gotten them in the last four and a half years, something else would have. Thus your comparison fails from a QALY perspective. A young American man in his twenties dropping dead from an infectious disease is unusual; an immunocompromised 85-year-old dying of a respiratory illness is not even news.
Folamh3
10d ago
If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.
Folamh3
10d ago
as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision
Drop the passive voice. Who suggested it?
Folamh3
10d ago
the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood
Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?
Folamh3
10d ago
During his 2016 campaign he explicitly stated that Caitlyn Jenner can use any bathroom in the Trump Tower that she pleases.
Folamh3
11d ago
Googling this, one of the first results was an NPR article, which is mostly about the damage that lethal injections inflicts on the lungs (it certainly sounds like lungs wouldn't be viable for transplant after a lethal injection, and China carries out 250 such transplants a year), but also mentions the effect on the heart in passing:
Lubarsky warns that if the first drug isn't anesthetizing the inmate, then they're likely to feel not only the suffocating sensation of pulmonary edema, but also the pain of the third drug: potassium chloride.
"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain."
Folamh3
11d ago
That's fair. Assuming this is the preferred method of execution in China, they're probably a source of some of the organs transplanted.
Folamh3
11d ago
With death by firing squad, aren't riflemen typically instructed to aim for the heart rather than the head?
Folamh3
12d ago
Just hire Mr. Beast
A man who became famous primarily by creating content appealing to a demographic who are too young to vote?
Folamh3
13d ago
Trump is President-elect for two days:
- Stock market hits record high
- Migrant caravan at our border dissolves
- Hamas calls for end to war
- Bitcoin hits record high
- Putin ready to end Ukraine war
- Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
- EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas
- Putin will sell oil in U.S. dollars
- Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
- NYC Mayor ends vouchers for illegals
- Mexico to stop migrants at U.S. border
- China wants to work peacefully with us
- Big U.S. company to move out of China
I repeat: Trump has been President-elect for two days.
Can any of you confirm or deny any of these claims?
Folamh3
13d ago
Bodily autonomy is a fake argument because in practice nothing else follows from it aside from abortion.
And sex work, and medical transition for minors.
Folamh3
14d ago
Last year my girlfriend bought me the book A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, as I discussed here.
Folamh3
14d ago
nightcore version
Gen Z "listen to a song at the tempo at which it was originally recorded" challenge (this is impossible)
Folamh3
14d ago
I liked "Hot to Go". It inspired a similar reaction as when I heard "Gimme Chocolate" by Babymetal: you can't help but smile at the sheer audacious silliness of the thing.
Listen to the radio. The only reason I've heard Chappell Roan's music is because I recently started a new job in which the office has a radio tuned to a local station playing chart music all day.
Alternatively, join a gym and don't bring your own Airpods. You will hear a lot of chart and dance music.
Or have female friends (this is how I first heard Olivia Rodrigo).
Folamh3
14d ago
All of this is premised on the assumption that Biden is capable of exercising any agency of his own. One would like to imagine that the person or people who were calling the shots in the last two (three? four?) years have some kind of investment in Biden's legacy and might hence be motivated to do something nice for which Biden can get the credit, but I don't know if we have any good reason to believe that's the case. Probably the people calling the shots are some anonymous DNC staffers who have more important things to worry about, like making sure everyone knows that that Orange Man sure is Bad, huh?
There were 16,000 murders in the US in 2018, but "only" 3,340 murders in El Salvador. I guess this means the US was "pretty obviously" 5 times as dangerous as El Salvador?
No, because DUH, the US population is fifty times the size of El Salvador.
Even more pertinent example: millions of people have been killed with guns since they were invented, but nukes have only killed a quarter-million people. I guess this means guns are "pretty obviously" more lethal than nukes?
No, because DUH, hundreds of millions of bullets have been fired in combat situations, but nukes have only been deployed in combat situations a grand total of twice.
It's so obnoxious that you're just pretending you don't know what the phrases "per capita" or "case fatality rate" mean. Or pretending that you don't know that an older population will always have a higher death rate than a younger population, because that's what "life expectancy" means. Or pretending that you don't know that one can easily end up with worse health outcomes from contracting a moderately severe illness in a developing nation vs. contracting a very severe illness in a developed nation, because of differences in the standard of medical care. Or pretending you don't know the difference between "an otherwise healthy person contracts an extremely lethal disease and dies" vs. "an old person who has been in out of hospital for years as their body slowly breaks down picks up an opportunistic infection which finishes them off (when a young healthy person would have shrugged off the same infection without even needing to be hospitalised)". I mean, you obviously do understand all of the above. No one thinks a disease which only kills 1% of people it infects is more lethal than one which kills 10%. To spell it out, in case it wasn't already abundantly clear:
None of what I'm saying is controversial or in dispute: this is all extremely basic medicine. When ranking how dangerous diseases are, we take all this into account, which is why no one would take you seriously if you claimed that AIDS is less dangerous than pneumonia, even though pneumonia kills around 4 million people every year - because, duh, in many if not most cases pneumonia is just the straw that broke the camel's back, the illness that finally finished off an old person (or indeed a person with AIDS!) who was bound to die soon anyway, and even for old people the case fatality rate is less than 50%.
I cannot believe my gender-critical opinions are now being used as ammunition with which to rubbish my apparently controversial claim that "diseases which kill a higher proportion of those infected with them are more lethal than those which kill a lower proportion". I look forward to the day when I tell someone that murders/100k of population is a more accurate gauge of how violent a country is than absolute number of murders, and they scoff and tell me how can they believe that, coming from someone who thinks Trump isn't Literally Hitler™?
The meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins estimated that NPIs probably prevented 0.2% of Covid deaths, which seems near enough to zero as to make functionally no difference. It's a rounding error.
And NPIs were not costless actions: they caused thousands of additional deaths both in the short-term (suicides, drug overdoses and other deaths of despair) and long-term (many health services deemed "nonessential" were shut down for extended periods of time during Covid, meaning there are tens of thousands of people in the world right now who have cancer and don't know it, or who know it and would have received treatment for it several years earlier if not for the hysterical overreaction to Covid). It's rather telling that the only country in the EU which never imposed a lockdown, Sweden, actually ended up with fewer Covid deaths per capita and fewer excess deaths per capita than the EU average, suggesting that whatever effects lockdowns etc. have can be completely dwarfed or negated by local factors (population density, climate, age of population etc.). I think most of the deaths from Covid were baked in as soon as it left Wuhan, and even if NPIs prevented a few deaths on the margin (or, more accurately, allowed a few old people to live a few extra months before something else finished them off), they did not come close to passing a cost-benefit analysis.
This is such an obnoxious and emotionally manipulative way of phrasing a question. Governmental policies are supposed to pass a cost-benefit analysis. "One person who would've died didn't die as a result of this policy, ergo it's a roaring success" is a standard which literally any government policy in the world could meet with ease, ergo it's meaningless.
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