FEEBLE JOE
C'mon, let's see of those push-ups.
It's true that what doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger. Anywhere in the body the virus can go, it'll scrape away at any meat it can reach to replicate itself. Healing = scarring, and scar tissue isn't as high quality as the regularly grown stuff.
Aftereffects and complications from being hit with any malady are to be expected, but it's also not a binary state of affairs. One who barely scrapes through after a bout in the ICU will be worse off, long term, than one who gets a scratchy throat for a few days. All disease is a morbid game of probabilities.
I'm not saying it's time to go out and lick doorknobs because covid is now safer than ever, but unless trends change, things are looking on track for the disease to largely peter out to regular influenza levels in terms of individual impact. Obviously you don't want to catch either, but neither are worth destroying your nation and way of life over.
I've never made an account, but I sincerely doubt that means I don't have one. Despite its evil, one can't help but marvel at the breadth of the Facebook dragnet.
They have completely the wrong message. You want to beat whitey? Build a culture so deep and live lives so good that whitey can't help but be envious.
It's a free market. Compete.
Year-over-year deaths plotted over time is a more accurate way to view the impact. Ideally, subtracting all violent and accidental deaths as well. And yes, per thousand or 100K to make the numbers digestible.
Sadly, few places worldwide have such rich recordkeeping to compare against. Some reasonably unslanted compilations have been made as "excess mortality" (eg: The Economist's) which all place the USA as decidedly average among first world countries. Far ahead of the few poorer nations where a meaningful comparison was even possible. Were it not for the criminally mishandled response in New York, things would look quite impressive.
I think Trump would do well to bring up Operation Warp Speed in the covid line of questioning. Early successes in travel bans, PPE and respirator production are great, but the massive funding and incredible progress made in vaccine development help a lot with the "what have you done for me lately" crowd and prove that it's still being taken seriously. Hell, maybe he did and HBO cut it out just make time elsewhere to double-down on the smear factor instead. One doesn't need to like or even consider taking a vaccine to acknowledge that simply having one available is the ultimate end to this bullshit.
--
There is a curious bit of information that the statistics are showing which doesn't get talked about much either; the disease is getting less deadly. Lowering case fatality, lowering case hospitalization rates, and lower excess mortality despite steady sub-exponential spread. Haven't found anything concrete to explain that, just spitballing about masks vs viral load, warm weather and sunshine, multiple strains (<-bet), and so on. Yet another oddity to spit in the face of every prediction made thus far...
The degrees of separation between here and many powerful figures is astonishingly low.
Look at us. We're the lobbyists now.
We show that Joe isn't Joe any more.
The man has no force of cognition left. A vote for him isn't a rose-colored return to the Obama years, it's a vote for shadowy figures who would puppeteer the oval office while the man himself does little but shake hands and struggle at crossword puzzles. Worse than dumb, he's a yes-man.
He is told his policy positions, he is told what to say, and when they tell him to abdicate, he will do just that.
There is nothing that can show this more clearly than Joe just putting what's left of himself on display. They'll be hidin' Biden as much as humanly possible, but the debates will be where the buck stops.
Jack's gonna expose himself? Maybe I'll just put the audio feed on for this one.
You know, I actually liked some of the starting points of rationality, but after looking at what conclusions they've reached and how the practitioners live their lives, it became pretty clear that there was a rather hard left turn at Albuquerque they shouldn't have taken.
They've decided the ends justify the means, but their ends and means both suck.
Now that whiteness has been defined, it looks like it's time to have a hard discussion about cultural appropriation.
HUGE ARMS DEAL
That's not what it's checking, this is CloudFlare running scripts to gather some information about your computer. It's fairly innocuous data to help identify bots vs. legitimate people.
The full details of what the check entails isn't divulged, but I would expect that the details can vary depending on probability scores based on initial data gathering and traffic patterns from the network origin. When a connection comes in from what is more likely to be a bot, they may even request that computationally expensive scripts run to make bots more costly to operate.
Web browsers do divulge a great deal of uniquely identifying data under most circumstances. Not data to put your personal name on a connection, but often enough to identify a single computer. The EFF's Panopticlick project can show some of this information to you and explains how it can be used for tracking.
It's a good laugh, but this picture predates 'the CHAZ' by quite a bit. A better laugh is their actual gardening attempts.
<cough> ... <plop>
AND WE WILL MAKE AMERICA METAL AGAIN! 🤘
I watched one of Comey's talks about ethics in leadership a year ago or so. It was actually pretty good. I suppose those who can't do, teach.
"I only rode the packed subway to the packed grocery store once a week, and otherwise never left my packed apartment! It defies all logic!"
Well, there are definitely videos of residential doors being welded shut in China. How much is government policy and how much is government propaganda is up to you to decide.
One would think it to be simple. Gloves are protection for yourself assuming you're not infected, masks are protections for others assuming you are infected. Don't cross the streams.
Observing this in practice at large? It's security theater. I could count the cross contaminations observed per aisle at the grocery on a single trip.
End result? Nowhere has locked down in a meaningful way yet apart from China where they weld apartment blocks shut and come back in a few weeks to scrape out the corpses. Definitely not enough to stop this, barely enough to slow it.
And we're still doing okay.
Per capita assumes an even distribution of infection and testing, which is a shit assumption layered atop a mountain of other shit assumptions.
Testing has a big enough margin of error that it's only useful to track positivity rates at scale to determine if infection rates are increasing or decreasing in a region. Targeting test capacity at specific areas allows for increased fidelity where it would be more useful.
But that's still based on more shit assumptions and sample bias when tests aren't randomized and the selection criteria keeps changing as test capacity increases (inpatient -> inpatient + caregivers -> very symptomatic + recent travel -> mildly symptomatic -> anyone). Garbage in, garbage out.
At this point, the aggregate statistics are so fucked that year-over-year death rates are all that's left to gauge impact. Those stats say you probably don't want to be in a nursing home right about now. Everyone else? Be sanitary but accept that you're gonna have one more unwanted thing made in China in your life. Trying to hide under the covers until it blows over will leave you as nothing but a dusty skeleton before it happens.
I remember one particularly somber moment when he was talking about survival rates for those who end up on ventilators. How they wouldn't report on that, but he was glad that they don't.
Trump has a full grasp on the situation. Biden's barely grasping at his last tenuous fibers of lucidity.
Quick! Buy 300 million faulty roll cages from China and mandate their installation and use under penalty of death! That'll save everyone!
"There's nothing left we can do"
Outta here with that despair and "can't do" bullshit. That's in the rules. Says so right there on the side: High Energy and Don't be Dumb.
Well, to be fair, they're not entirely unrelated.
stares towards China