...huh, they do desktops too. TIL.
Visa is usually REALLY risk adverse when it comes to anything
...which is why alienating half the US is a somewhat surprising move.
Well it's either i pay those 3% fees and get nothing back, or pay those 3% fees and get half of it back.
Congratulations. You are the defector in the prisoner's dilemma.
Welcome to game theory.
The only reason why the company accepts those 3% fees in the first place is because there are too many people like you that shrug and defect.
Yep.
Anything like company "rewards" programs, credit cards, etc are all like this.
TANSTAAFL
Ah yes, the classic "we'll take the benefits but foist off all the risk to another group".
The chances of this happening was 1 in 1,000,000,000
If your model assigns a probability of one in a billion to something that has happened, your model is almost certainly wrong. (...up to certain assumptions. You have to be careful about cases like 'the probability of any one person winning the lottery is effectively zero'... but someone generally wins the lottery.)
For instance - you give me a supposedly-fair coin. I flip it thirty times and it comes up heads every time. My model is '50/50 chance of heads/tails' - which gives a little less than a one-in-a-billion chance of 30 heads / 30 trials. My model is wrong. Perhaps the coin isn't fair. Or perhaps I'm uncannily good at reproducibly flipping a coin. Or perhaps I can't tell heads from tails on this particular coin. Or perhaps I was lying when I said it got 30 heads. Or perhaps you told this to every person on the planet and I was just the person who got lucky. Etc.
Or for instance - you give me a stack of a thousand ballots for recounting, split 50/50 Biden/Trump. Upon inspection, 250 ballots previously counted for Biden are now counted for Trump, and 0 ballots previously counted for Trump are now counted for Biden. My model was that mistakes are equally likely in either direction. My model is wrong. (Though, honestly, I haven't bothered to calculate exactly how wrong.)
Another interesting trend is body temperature - which appears to be declining over time. (See e.g. https://elifesciences.org/articles/49555.pdf).
Unfortunately, I suspect you are correct.
Twin studies are the classic response there, but even they have issues.
Personally I'd lean towards graphics card:
windows [...] interfereing with each other,
The other symptoms match, but this doesn't generally happen with just a flaky connection. The cable never sees the per-composited state to be able to mangle like this.
u/bubble_bursts - one way to diagnose this issue would be to see if the graphics corruption also occurs on an external monitor. If it does, it's likely graphics card. If it doesn't, it's likely the cable connecting the graphics card to the display.
IIRC some macbooks had known graphics card issues over time - wonder if it's an affected model. Old laptop if so.
That is an interesting and plausible cofounder.
Any ideas how to compensate for that? (Barring e.g. life expectancy... which given DOB >2008 will take quite a while to become apparent.)
It's largely a moot point.
If you were putting tracking in, you'd put it in the baseband processor.
More commonly it's transmission than reception that's an issue, and actually doing so as opposed to talking about it, but not always.
(For instance, it is illegal to have some types of devices capable of reception of (or capable of "readily being altered by the user to operate within"!) some frequencies in the 800MHz-900MHz range for some relatively convoluted reasons around mobile phones - see https://computer.rip/2020-11-28%20the%20verboten%20band.html.)
At the end of the day, I'm not a lawyer. Some of this is legal, likely, but if it's ruled to be legal after a couple of years of back and forth with the site shut down that is in and of itself a problem. So all we can do is tread rather carefully.
Thank you kindly for the link in clickable form.
Oh huh.
I thought that that graph was misleading because the number of patients was different between the two groups, but nope, this is after adjusting for that.
Figure 5. Analysis 5. Cumulative office visits in the vaccinated (orange) vs. unvaccinated (blue) patients born into the practice: the clarity of the age-specific differences in the health fates of individuals who are vaccinated (2763) compared to the 561 unvaccinated in patients born into the practice over ten years is most strikingly clear in this comparison of the cumulative numbers of diagnoses in the two patient groups. The number of office visits for the unvaccinated is adjusted by a sample size multiplier factor (4.9) to the expected value as if the number of unvaccinated in the study was the same as the number of vaccinated.
(emp. added)
One thing that is missing from said graphs that would be interesting is, well, the intended targets. Namely, the same graphs for the specific diseases that the vaccines in question were targeted for.
Be very careful about legalities. There are many who would wish to shut down or silence the site any way they could, and "colluding to violate the law" is rather up there among excuses to do so.
Usual classic is just (decent) yogurt.
It's login that's down, mainly. Or rather, most services are down if you're logged in.
And again, assumptions and attempted belittlement. I might suggest that you'd get a better response in general if you gave the same knowledge presented in a somewhat less belligerent manner.
and explain to people how these tests are “inaccurate”
I might suggest that you'd get a better response in general if you read what was written as opposed to what you assumed was said.
Kindly do not put words in other people's mouths.
it would take 7-10 additional rounds if not many more
Depends a lot on how exactly the dilution is done. As a counterexample: if you've got rare particles with enough in one particle to be detected after the full PCR process, then no. More dilution will decrease the chance of a particle being found in a test, and hence percentage of samples that are positive in that case, but won't increase the number of rounds required to be detected if a particle is present. (At least in the regime where the probability of more than one particle in a sample is relatively low.)
In an ideal world that would never happen - your sample prep and dilution would ensure that no such particles would be present - if only we lived in an ideal world.
I might suggest that starting off with belittling the person you are replying to is not the most effective technique.
Yes, this is oversimplified. All summarizations are.
I could say "to understand this go get a BSc"; that wouldn't be particularly helpful. (And someone with a MSc would in turn complain...)
If QPCR is performed with known negative controls and they are consistently producing negative results even at a “high” Ct for the given experiment, then a sample that tests positive is very, very likely to be a real positive.
...or an unintended partial match of something else present in the sample that is nevertheless close enough to replicate. Negative controls don't help with that.
(...well, kinda. It does help if your negative control happens to include said something else. It doesn't help if e.g. the novel sequence you selected for your primer isn't as novel as you thought it was and there's some other benign virus floating around somewhere (not in your negative control) that has a partial match.)
I suppose it depends on what your definition of "real positive" is. Yes, in some senses finding something else in the sample that replicates is a real positive; it's still a false positive in the sense that it didn't find what the test was intended to look for.
We are talking 100 - 1,000 times more dilute, which alone requires over 7 - 10 additional rounds of PCR to account for.
Absolutely. Which ends up with over 7 - 10 additional rounds of PCR compared to a typical lab experiment, rather by definition. And in turn means that you have an additional 7-10 rounds of PCR affecting any inadvertent partial matches also.
To elaborate a bit. In a perfect world you could run an arbitrary number of PCR cycles without an issue... but it's not a perfect world.
A PCR cycle, ideally, effectively goes "any DNA that has a region that matches this start and end gets doubled". With the idea that after a bunch of doublings it becomes fairly obvious if the target is present or not. (One classic method at the end is, essentially, toss in some DNA of known sizes, sort the result by size, and check if anything is the 'right size' for what you're looking for. (E.g. if you're looking for something that should be 1140 base pairs long, you might toss in DNA with a length of 1000, 1050, 1100, 1150, 1200, etc. And then you get a nice 'ruler' within which you can search for your target.) There are other methods of course.)
The idea being that you pick a start and end 'key' (primer) that's fairly unique to the thing you're hunting for, with the size check at the end as an additional filter / crosscheck.
But everything at those scales is fuzzy. There is no such thing as "matching only that specific sequence" - if something is "close enough" it will still, occasionally, double. Like jamming a jigsaw puzzle piece in where it doesn't belong. And even if something does match it won't always double, especially as the concentration increases. Eventually, you don't get doubling because, well, there isn't enough free material around to be able to double.
So what happens as the number of cycles increases? Well, if there is a true match it'll double for the first while, then saturate and flatten out to quasi-linear. And if there's something that isn't a good fit, and say replicates 10% of the time? Well, it'll still be exponential growth, just slower. But you replicate enough and you will still saturate sooner or later.
WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?
Consequences of them getting into the education system, especially collages.
Hrm. High acidity triggering the test perhaps?
The problem with a no-politics rule is that everything can be construed to be political or non-political, according to the whims of the moderator.
Sooner or later down the line this results in a moderator who allows the sub to devolve into /r/politics (a.k.a. removing all political content that doesn't agree with their particular political bubble).