Lurker > adjl

I had the human body one, and the space one sounds very familiar, but I don't remember if I had it or not.

party_animal07 posted...

Has Konami even released any games lately?

They released the Castlevania Advance Collection within the last couple years. That kinda counts, I guess.

ForteEXE3850 posted...

The accuser has additionally requested and been granted anonymity, making judging their credibility of the accusation even harder.

Requesting anonymity when accusing a celebrity of a crime is just basic common sense. Regardless of the truth of the matter, making her identity known would put her in danger from some of the show's more... unhealthy fans. Case in point, some of the tweet responses earlier amounting to "he should be able to rape teenagers if he wants, shut up and let me watch tv."

If the allegations are credible enough to go to trial, they're pretty credible. That's all we really need to know.

ForteEXE3850 posted...

I don't know if Justin Roiland is secretly a monster or not, but I know there isn't enough credible information to prove it one way or another.

And I know you haven't looked at any of the links or screengrabs provided in this topic that provide enough credible information to prove it one way or another. That's not exactly the conduct of a decent person.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Granted, the poll here is anonymous so in this case they aren't necessarily getting specific personal info (unless GameFAQs is keeping track of how everyone votes in each poll and is also selling that data while keeping the fact that they can do that secret, which is entirely possible), but even without specificity they're still gaining data on overall trends and assumptions.

Yep. At the very least, we already know they collect data on where votes come from (since we can look at geographic data for results) and presumably what time each vote comes in, and those three points alone can reveal some useful trends. Toss in the very real possibility that results are not actually anonymous (we already know they track who has and has not voted to prevent duplicate votes) and they can corroborate one poll's results with others (age being a big one), and you can get some real value.

Of course, the real value of less than 10,000 poll results is kind of debatable, but that's the theory.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The same thing all poll information is used for. Selling it to advertisers and marketing firms.

Which, in turn, is used to make inferences about our living situations and the circumstances in which we browse GameFAQs. Those selecting 100+ are likely early-year university students visiting from class. Those selecting 10+ are likely browsing from work or from smaller classes. 2-4 are probably at home, either with their families or with multiple roommates and are either using their phone in a common area or don't have their own private room from which to browse (suggesting lower SES). Those picking 1 probably have one roommate or and SO, but not a private room (again, suggesting lower SES). Those picking 0 are either able to live alone or have a room to themselves, suggesting more comfortable SES. Those picking "outside" in areas that currently get winter are likely working outdoor jobs, while regardless of area that indicates some of what they're using their phone's data plan for.

Like most data, the usefulness isn't necessarily immediately apparent for this sort of information, but the whole concept of Big Data operates on the fundamental idea of "collect everything we can now so we're more likely to have what we need when we come up with use cases later." Data is collected knowing that much of it will likely be useless, but when somebody does start looking for a correlation between variables, having a large and varied data set increases the odds that they'll be able to find an answer.

MrMelodramatic posted...

https://twitter.com/alliegoertz/status/1614098722673287168?s=46&t=Tmus555oGc9hzz6Y0xz8iw

and heres the source on that convo with a high school girl. No idea if its legit but the above tweet is definitely credible
https://twitter.com/agalaxydivided/status/1614777583488610304?s=46&t=8Jfn5c_3OVTrq5SL6-s7aw

Some of the replies to that Tweet are... concerning, to say the least. One is literally "If 16-year-olds can get abortions, why shouldn't we be allowed to sleep with them?"

Lending further credence to the belief that one of Trump's adherents has joined the mod team.

PissedOffMonk posted...

If your doctor is willing and able to help complete the authorization, go for it. You should be able to get reimbursed as long as the approval is retroactive. The money might not be an issue, but the data might be useful to help make the medication more accessible for others.

Pretty much. Make sure your doctor sends any bills for time spent completing the authorization to the insurance company, just to make sure that turning down this $8/year cost ends up costing them far more than that.

koopabrosblack posted...

Being open world shit invalidates any claim of goty, always.

Not really. The concept is very much and overdone flavour of the month at this point, and a lot of open world games are extremely formulaic and unremarkable (including pretty much every high-profile game Ubisoft has put out in the last several years), but that doesn't mean a studio can't produce a high-quality one that does enough interesting things with the concept to really stand out. By most accounts, Elden Ring does exactly that, eschewing the more common tropes that many feel hold typical open-world fare back.

It's mostly just that Elden Ring came out in the same year as Xenoblade 3 (which actually also has considerable open-world elements that are done extremely well) that invalidates any claims that it's GotY.

captpackrat posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/9/AAQwHjAAEGJ9.jpg

We were in a vintage store a while back and my girlfriend picked up a cookbook from the 50's by Sealtest (a Canadian dairy company), and the whole thing basically consists of "we're started trying to sell more cottage cheese, so here are literally hundreds of recipes where we just put cottage cheese in regular stuff to convince you to buy cottage cheese." Some of them make some sense. Others are a peanut butter and cottage cheese sandwich.

Count_Drachma posted...

Outside of government contracts -- such as to prop up green industries and farm subsidies -- "corporate welfare" isn't a f***ing thing.

If a corporation's full-time employees need to be on welfare to make ends meet instead of the corporation simply paying them enough to do so, that corporation is on welfare. This is, of course without even considering the ridiculous ways that corporations (and especially those who own them) exploit loopholes to avoid paying taxes or even receive refunds (which overwhelmingly go into the pockets of those at the top and not into improving the welfare of their employees).

Reminder that 70% of all welfare recipients are working full-time, which means the government is picking up the slack of employers that are unwilling or unable to pay their employees enough to survive (which is an important - albeit unwritten - condition of their employment). That sounds an awful lot like subsidies to me.

If you'd told me back in the days of FE9/10 that the next Fire Emblem game had had a bunch of spoilers leaked on social media (putting aside for a moment the fact that social media use has evolved considerably since 2007), I would have been pretty baffled that anyone cared enough for leaking it to be worth the effort. It's kind of remarkable how high-profile the series has become since then.

NeoSioType posted...

I think changing the motherboard might invalidate my OEM license because it's considered a new computer.

It probably will, but my understanding is that by contacting Microsoft directly you can usually get the license transferred over. It's just a couple extra hoops to jump through.

You can absolutely have pizza without cheese, though you usually won't see it outside of places that try to be gourmet or otherwise different. The typical greasy sort of pizza (which I personally consider to be an entirely separate category from gourmet pizza, since they're just so different and satisfy different desires) does need cheese (or a substitute), but variants can work just fine without it.

Lokarin posted...

all achievements and a 32 heat clear

Makes sense. Nicely done.

Nope, everybody loves me.

funkyfritter posted...

Talk to a doctor about it.

This. There's a ton of variability in how ADHD affects different people, and a similar amount of variability in how well medicating it works vs. developing behavioural coping strategies. The only way to know what's going to work best for you is trial and error with the guidance of somebody who knows how to evaluate the results you observe. That'll also give you an actual diagnosis, rather than speculation by laypersons.

How did you define 100%?

Yeah, omega imbalance is definitely a concern because of how prevalent 6's are, and to that end trying to limit their intake isn't a bad idea (and generally easier/healthier than binging 3's to compensate).

GanglyKhan posted...

The populace is somehow not banding together and realizing if we all just agreed to not buy eggs for two weeks, we could collectively tank the market and drive prices through the floor. But people lack the motivation, hopefulness, and/or ambition to try such a hilariously easy manuver. If someone can't go two weeks without eating an egg, I would be surprised to learn that they know how to tie their shoes.

That's more than a little hopelessly idealistic. Getting the entire country to agree to do anything is pretty much impossible, let alone something that will inconvenience them at all. On top of that, to pull off such a feat would require the plan to be very heavily publicized, in which case those selling eggs would notice what was going on and just jack the prices back up after normal consumption resumed.

I'm also getting the impression that you think it's just a matter of people choosing to not have a couple eggs for breakfast, which grossly underestimates the culinary significance of eggs. To stop using eggs altogether would require pretty much every single non-vegan bakery to close, as well as every breakfast-focused restaurant (most of them have options other than serving eggs directly, but pancakes, waffles, crepes, and french toast all require eggs, and cutting those out as well would leave a pretty sparse menu). Eggs are incredibly versatile as an ingredient, offering many valuable physical properties that can be difficult and expensive to replicate (and, again, the degree to which such a boycott would be publicized would likely result in short-term price increases for those substitutes to capitalize on the spike in demand).

Lokarin posted...

ya, it's kinda weird

If you say "Action RPG" I know you mean stuff like Ys and Secret of Mana, but if you say "ARPG" I think Diablo and Torchlight

Exactly. Does it make any sense whatsoever? Nope. But it's how the terminology has evolved, so we just kinda have to roll with it and clarify as needed.

GanglyKhan posted...

See: Any Japanese ARPG. Tales, Ys, Kingdom Hearts, etc; all have very established characters and identities. They've even made an entire crossover Tales game as it is.

Action JRPG's and ARPG's are very different games. Heck, for that matter, I'd even go so far as to say that action RPG's and ARPG's are different genres, as much as that's really stupid if you put even the slightest amount of consideration into what the acronym actually stands for. When the term "ARPG" is used, it's specifically in reference to Diablo and its ilk, not simply any RPG that isn't turn-based. It's not the most intuitive subgenre name, but it's what we've got to work with.

GanglyKhan posted...

Anyway, yes, processed seed oils tend to be higher in Omega-6 which causes inflammation, they lack the proper type of amino acid for cognitive function via strengthening your myelin sheathes (the proper amino acids are easily found in animal fat and butter), and they require artificial antioxidants to prevent spoilage. If your product needs additives beyond salt to stay on the shelf longer, I'm not touching that s***. Especially not nitrates in meat products.

I believe you mean "fatty acids," not amino acids. Amino acids are the monomer that comprises proteins, and are typically present only in minute trace amounts in oils (if at all).

Also, omega 6 fatty acids are not inherently bad for you, but you need a roughly equivalent amount of omega 6 and omega 3. That means consuming too much omega 6 is indeed bad for you, but that's not a matter of "you need to avoid them" as it is "you need to avoid consuming more of them than you do omega 3's." Omega 3 can be harder to get, so that's a bit of a challenge, but it's not inherently a reason to avoid 6.

I don't think the concept would really work that well. Borderlands aside, ARPG's tend not to be particularly focused on individual character identities, especially where so many just have a customizable avatar (if not in terms of appearance/voice, in terms of how they fight) instead of a defined character with an actual personality.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the concept, but I fully expect there to be health concerns and for research into identifying and mitigating them to run into all kinds of ideological issues (both in terms of proponents downplaying risks and opponents exaggerating them), so I'm leery of any early forays into the practice.

Nothing now. Since buying it a year ago I've struggled off and on with the oil pressure light periodically flickering, but the oil change before last I made sure to get an OEM filter instead of using whatever the quick lube shop I went to had (where the light was on, I didn't feel I could wait the 2-3 weeks for an appointment at a proper place, where it was during tire season and everywhere was booked pretty solidly), and that seemed to solve the issue until the most recent oil change, where the tech also found a small leak around my O-ring. From what I could tell by researching it a bit, the bypass valve on OEM filters seems to have a different pressure threshold from others, so I'm guessing that was why the car was detecting a fault. Either way, everything's running smoothly now.

That bruh ain't right.

Count_Drachma posted...

In BS0's mind, it's not a problem when an elected Democrat does anything. For the non-zealots, it proves what every reasonable person has known all along -- this IS a common thing and the claims about Trump's files were ginned up beyond hyperbole and were made in bad faith.

Taking classified documents is a common thing. Hiding classified documents and actively interfering with efforts to retrieve them is not.

Nichtcrawler-X posted...

Involuntary euthanasia is one of the viler practices from the darkest chapters of human history, nothing "just a meme" about that.

It's poking fun at how myopic the "we don't call 911" thing is by sardonically pointing out that 911 includes quite a few services that can't be readily replaced by guns. It's not actually promoting euthanasia.

VampireCoyote posted...

I dont even remember it

it was that inoffensive

It was one of those signs that says "we don't call 911 in this house" with a gun underneath, followed by a second picture of a woman clutching her chest like she's having a heart attack and a dude with a shotgun saying "sorry grandma." Not exactly peak abhorrence.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

Welp. Far-Queue got suspended for that 9-1-1 meme.

This is lending credence to the belief that there's a cranky Trumpy type on the mod staff now. The only people that meme could possibly have offended is the sort of person that has a printed copy of the second amendment wrapped around their favourite buttplug.

Pirates of the Caribbean has lots of hard R's.

BigOlePappy posted...

Typically, there is a lot of trial and error, because both antidepressants and cannabis affect people differently.

This is something that really can't be understated. If she feels that the antidepressant she's been prescribed isn't working, that is in fact completely normal and her doctor is probably expecting to have to try a few different things (provided they're reasonably competent). A couple of failures don't indicate anything about the doctor's competence. It's only when they start ignoring complaints of severe side effects and/or inefficacy and insisting that you stick with their suggestion that you should start questioning their judgement, though even then the appropriate course of action is to find a new doctor for a second opinion, not to make an independent decision to quit.

Marijuana can function as an antidepressant, but it doesn't necessarily work well for everyone and stopping any prescribed psychiatric drug without consulting one's doctor to be weaned off properly is a monumentally stupid idea. If she wants to switch to using pot, she should be discussing that with her doctor to make the transition properly and safely instead of self-medicating. Making such decisions without medical supervision could literally kill her.

Mensis posted...

Price gouging eggs is one of the shittiest things. Ok, I'm supposed to believe chickens are laying fewer eggs because of the economy? Fuck off

Chickens aren't necessarily laying fewer eggs (though avian flu has impacted how many chickens can be kept in a given farm), but economic factors do affect how expensive it is to hire people to collect the eggs, how expensive it is to run the necessary equipment, how much it costs to feed the chickens, and how much it costs to transport the eggs to market. There's also almost certainly quite a bit of price gouging going on, since corporations have latched on to "we need to account for inflation" as an excuse to jack up prices of pretty much everything (thereby themselves becoming inflation), but economic factors certainly do affect the cost of eggs.

WorstOfAll posted...

I actually did come here for advice from people who have been very open about having experience with the struggle I am facing.

What advice is there, really? You've got three options:

• Self-care
• Get laid
• Get over it and move on, same as you would with anything else you want but can't/won't get

You've shot down 1 and 2, so that leaves #3 as your only course of action.

Well this is a throwback.

Buying top of the line is always pretty foolish. You pay a substantial premium and get pretty much nothing for it (at least nothing that will be realized any time soon, by which point equivalents to the current top of the line will be much cheaper).

Not having sex is basically the same as having sex, except with less sex.

Yeah, the component pricing shenanigans of the last couple years have thrown a wrench into such value calculations. I haven't kept on top of them enough to make that particular comparison very well.

It's sarcasm. Last I paid attention, Alienware isn't a bad choice if you're going for a gaming laptop, but for a desktop they're insanely overpriced compared to just building it yourself (like 2-3 times more expensive, and they skimp on lower-profile parts like PSU's).

https://www.logicalincrements.com/

That's an excellent starting point and includes links to other resources that will teach you how to do the actual assembly.

Arcturusisnow posted...

So you both admit to being fools. Nintendo is never going give you anything for kissing their butt, by the way. So you may as well stop doing that.

If you got Nintendo fanboyism out of 300 words dunking on Blizzard (based on things they objectively and unarguably do) and a one-off comment about liking BotW, I think you might be looking a little too hard for Nintendo fanboyism.

Zareth posted...

Yeah I was like "whoa a stonetoss that isn't shitting on minorities"

I mean, if we take the poll results as being an accurate representation of the general population, foot fetishists are technically a minority.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

"Low" doesn't mean "zero." But as far as how far I take it, it's like this: I look at what probability says should happen. If it doesn't happen, then I ask "Okay, now how do I feel about the odds? What do I think will happen? Because the experts turned out to be wrong."

Why do you think that having something improbable happen to you means that those who say it's improbable are wrong?

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

"Luck" is a reductive term, it's not a "mystery" what happened. Those "countless factors" are still identifiable. I didn't come in contact with the virus because I did this thing and that thing, other people did this thing and that thing, and so on.

Realistically, they aren't identifiable. The world is too chaotic a system to ever identify them all, let alone quantify the role they played or pretend anyone controlled them to produce the desired outcome. Yes, there were causes for the observed effect, but those causes are too numerous and too uncontrollable to call that any more than random chance.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Then that means my immune system was too strong for the virus. That's not luck either, that's something science can figure out. If an immune system can be too strong for the virus.

Not really. Immune strength is very difficult to quantify to enough of an extent to make assessments like that, "strong enough" is going to depend pretty much entirely on a pathogen load that is impossible to measure unless you somehow intercept it on the way in (in which case, continuing to put it in would be profoundly unethical), and the whole thing gets even more complicated because much of Covid's pathology comes from how the immune system responds to it and stronger therefore isn't necessarily better.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

That's the blood pressure factor I'm talking about. If such a butterfly effect is possible, science should be aware of it.

Can you tell me how many milligrams of sodium you consumed and at what times for each of the last fourteen days? How about potassium? Calcium? How many litres of water? Did you measure your cortisol and adrenaline levels at multiple intervals throughout the last few days? Body temperature? Have you been constantly monitoring your blood pressure? Complete blood count?

That's the kind of data you'd need to uncover such minute variations in blood pressure as I was talking about, and quite frankly, nobody can provide that kind of data. Without that data, you cannot associate that with infection rates or prognoses. That is impossible, no matter how much you want to think that science should be able to overcome that.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

You don't need to say "Everything is a factor" and close the book on it. You can further research by looking into these outlier cases and figuring out what went right/wrong. Get actual concrete answers instead of saying "Well it could've been anything."

And that's precisely what ongoing research is doing by identifying and refining risk factors. If you want to get into complete determinism for whatever outcome happens, though, you can consider everything to be a factor. That's just the nature of comprehensive determinism, and why comprehensive determinism is a pretty stupid approach to take to anything.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Based on it being three years so far. Maybe I underestimate just how much modern medicine sucks at discovering things, but I thought we'd be further along by now.

Why do you think that three years is enough to understand Covid so comprehensively? What precedent is there for that? Where is that expectation coming from?

Far-Queue posted...

I bought one ticket. There were other people in line buying 10 or 20 tix but I can't see how that changes the odds all that much

It multiplies them by 10 or 20, at least. It's still a minute number, of course, but it is objectively a significant increase.

slacker03150 posted...

https://www.meretdemeures.com/en/detail/estate-for-sale-in-villefranche-sur-mer-alpes-maritimes-france/1917/

Here we go. All yall invited to the house warming party if I win.

Imagine a mansion in the US listing "close to public transport" as an asset. That's kind of wild.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

I said I think we should know more by now.

Based on what, exactly?

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

It's credible that myocarditis is a lethal disease. We're just gonna say that the myocarditis that these vaccines cause can't possibly kill you?

We can empirically say that all vaccine-related cases have been mild enough that zero deaths have occurred. That means the risk of death from vaccine-related myocarditis is vanishingly low.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Traditional odds said I should've caught the virus years ago. But I didn't. So clearly I can't just assume trends will apply to me perfectly.

If you roll a die and get 1 three times in a row, do you assume that all subsequent rolls will be 1 because you can't assume that trends will apply to you perfectly? Or do you recognize that a small sample deviating from what the odds would tell you to expect does not mean the odds are incorrect?

For that matter, how far do you take that? Do you refuse to go outside because the stated risk of being struck by lightning could be much higher for you? Do you spend all your money on lottery tickets because the odds of losing might not be as high for you as for everyone else? Where do you draw the line of concluding that trends don't apply to you perfectly because this one unlikely thing happened?

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Why? Because you're supposed to try and understand diseases like this.

I didn't ask "why should people try to figure things out?". I asked "why do you feel they should have already figured out everything there is to know about Covid?", which is a very different question.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

In fact, science is about leaving no mysteries on the table.

It's about answering as many questions as possible, but there will always be limits to how many questions can be answered (and they're still only going to be answered by the best available guesses). Heck, in most cases, answering one question reveals dozens more, because that's just the nature of our infinitely complex universe. That doesn't mean nobody should try, but it does mean you sometimes have to accept that time, manpower, and funding are all finite and temper your expectations accordingly.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

If you're saying "Well we aren't giving up," then that would mean we still have things to figure out. It's not true that there's nothing to figure out.

Research is ongoing, and likely will be for the rest of our lives. I'm not saying there's nothing to figure out, I'm saying that it will never be figured out as comprehensively as you seem to be demanding.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

I don't accept "I was lucky." I'm pretty sure I didn't catch the virus up until now because I didn't come in contact with the virus up until now. If I had, I would've caught it. And I'm pretty sure catching vs. not catching is as simple as that.

And that was luck. That was the product of countless factors like the movement of people, where you went and when you went there, the air currents and conditions wherever you were, the hygiene, PPE practices, and vaccination status of those around you... The risk of infection did not manifest for you not because it wasn't there, but because you were lucky enough that it wasn't realized.

You also come into contact with countless viruses every single day, yet are not infected by them. Infection is not so simple as a binary "contact virus-->get sick." Your immune system is constantly working to beat down would-be infections before they can cause you harm. If you do become infected, it's because something has made it past those early lines of defense. That can be the result of any number of possibilities, including a larger pathogen load, an impaired immune response (which in turn has many potential causes), or a pathogen that's particularly good at getting in.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

I'm not saying research funders care, but research funders don't care about a lot of things they should. Maybe they should care more about whether or not and to what extent blood pressure has an effect on whether or not you survive the virus.

Oh, blood pressure has already been considered. That's an easy one, given that hypertension is usually pretty well-documented for patients and BP is monitored constantly for as long as you're in the hospital. Hypertension has been identified as significant risk factor for becoming seriously ill with Covid, though as with any risk factor, that doesn't guarantee severe illness.

I'm not talking about broadly associating blood pressure with Covid, I'm talking about that hypothetical minute variation in blood pressure (which no machine would detect) triggering a butterfly effect that ultimately worsens the infection. That will never be researched, because it's far too obscure and has too little predictive value to be worth investing in.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...
All I need from other people is the Big List Of Factors.

Virologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and anyone else involved in the field can and do write literal PhD theses on that subject that barely scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg that is that question. You will not find a comprehensive answer to it anywhere, let alone on a video game message board. A comprehensive answer does not and will not ever exist. It's just too complex a question.

Alternatively, just say that everything is a factor. Absolutely everything which you, your ancestors, and everyone that is or has ever been around you have done and experienced has had some impact on who you are now and how the finer nuances of your body work. As I mentioned earlier, if the 45,818,169th nucleotide on your third chromosome is an A instead of a G because you're related to a human that got busy with a neanderthal 60,000 years ago, your risk of severe illness/death is doubled. That's the kind of scale you need to look at to get a comprehensive picture of your risk (and you need to do this for every disease if you're going to hold them all to the same standard), and it just isn't feasible to cover everything on such a scale.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

But if I do have all known risk factors and survive, there should be a more substantial answer beyond "You just got lucky." That is what I want science to figure out.

I think you're underestimating just how much random chance is involved in biology and medicine. In truth, there's a certain amount of determinism and it's not true randomness, but that deterministic outcome is the product of so many seemingly-unrelated factors that identifying them all is impossible. Even the simple act of "virus infects cell" is a result of the virus floating aimlessly around until it randomly bumps into the right receptor in the right orientation to latch on and inject its genetic payload, then it's a matter of waiting until a ribosome randomly bumps into the start codon on that strand of genetic material (we're just going to look at mRNA viruses here, for simplicity's sake), then randomly bumping into the corresponding tRNA-amino acid complexes to assemble the required proteins. Similarly, the immune response relies on the appropriate immune cells bumping into the viral particles in a way that allows them to detect antigens against which antibodies can be generated.

Now, all of this happens on such a large scale that all of these random events do still end up happening despite the very high odds that any given individual interaction doesn't (you roll 400,000 d20's, you're going to get plenty of 20's), but in the case of infectious diseases, you usually are starting out with a relatively small pathogen load and it's well within the realm of possibility that you end up with half as many of those viral particles successfully infecting your cells as somebody else with an identical pathogen load gets, or that your immune system detects the virus 3-4 rounds of replication earlier than somebody else's. If you really dug into it, you might be able to say that that's because you didn't put salt on last night's dinner and that meant your blood pressure was 0.005% lower and that meant the B cell that kicked off your immune response was moving slightly slower and got to the infection site just as the first virus did and that meant you mounted a response before the rest of the load could reproduce, but determining that is going to be absurdly difficult and largely useless, so nobody's going to fund the research needed to do so.

Within the next decade, I expect it will be possible to narrow down the identified risk factors for Covid and explain some of their specific mechanisms, but there will never come a point when random variation is completely eliminated from the equation. Risk factors for adverse outcomes do not guarantee those adverse outcomes. You've seen this on a macroscopic scale: You've presumably engaged in behaviours that would be considered risk factors for Covid infection, but you haven't been infected until now. Why are you willing to accept "I was lucky" as an explanation for that, but not for what happens once the virus is inside your body? The human body is no less chaotic than the world outside. Sometimes, the only reason you will ever be able to find for the outcome of a disease is "I got (un)lucky," and that's not a failure on science's part.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

Have you not heard about the myocarditis/pericarditis cases cropping up, particularly from the Moderna vaccine?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788346

Those who have argue "Well, it's very rare." But "very rare" doesn't mean "Won't ever happen." Because it clearly happened to those people. I don't want myocarditis. I'm trying to make choices that will keep myocarditis out of my way.

And how many deaths have been reported (credibly, not on OpenVAERS, since I could go on OpenVAERS right now and say that I grew extra penises out of my ears after being vaccinated) as being correlated with those cases of myo(peri)carditis? And of those correlated deaths, how many are believed to have been causally linked?

Yes, myocarditis is a potential side effect of the mRNA vaccines, especially in younger males (for reasons that are yet unknown). Nobody's really disputing that. Attributing deaths to that side effect, however, is just not true. The myocarditis cases in question are easily treatable and cause no lasting harm.

On the other hand, there have indeed been deaths associated with blood clots from the A-Z and Janssen vaccines (particularly younger women), as I mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, that risk is lower than the risk of dying of blood clots from Covid itself, even without considering the option of getting an mRNA vaccine instead.

ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

But what you should be able to do is look at that person who died of a particular strain and answer why. Or catch them before they die and figure out why they're having such a bad reaction to it.

Why should you be able to do that? What precedent is there for that being possible with any disease, let alone a brand new one? Do you have any idea how short three years actually is in the grand scheme of scientific research?

The medical community is trying to pin down risk factors, but that's a very, very complicated analysis due to just how many different variables there are. Even once a risk factor is identified (and many have been), studying it well enough to fully understand the mechanism behind it takes a very long time and is very challenging, especially where we don't have the option of actually experimenting on people by infecting them with the disease in a controlled trial (because that would be mean). Those analyses are ongoing around the world, but there's no reason to ever expect results as conclusive as you seem to be expecting, let along to expect them so soon.

Quite simply, this is the best science can do. It's always been the best science can do, and in many ways is actually better than usual because those working on this subject have had a much easier time getting funding and public support than those working on lower-profile issues. People are absolutely working on understanding it better, but the information you're asking for will likely never exist. You're just going to have to come to terms with that and accept that that doesn't mean nobody is trying to improve.