Lurker > adjl

ReturnOfFa posted...

Please circle where it says it's peer reviewed. I'll wait.

https://www.ijidonline.com/

The International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID) is published monthly by the International Society for Infectious Diseases. IJID is a peer-reviewed, open access journal and publishes original clinical and laboratory-based research, together with reports of clinical trials, reviews, and some case reports dealing with the epidemiology, clinical diagnosis, treatment, and control of infectious diseases with particular emphasis placed on those diseases that are most common in under-resourced countries.

There are plenty of things wrong with his use of that paper, but the peer review isn't one of them.

MartianManchild posted...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
Get rekt haters. You only listen to the science you want to listen to.

n=72, divided into three groups (looks like 23, 23, and 22, not sure where the other 4 went), from over a year ago. I was going to comment that it failed to divide the results by vaccination status, but in December 2020, I don't think anyone in Bangladesh was vaccinated, so that's a moot point that nevertheless muddies the data further. I wouldn't exactly call that conclusive, especially not in the face of larger-scale reviews that do not find Ivermectin to be meaningfully helpful.

Amuseum posted...

so how did they decide what is "misinformation"? fallacy of argument from authority?

Given that the primary aim is to avoid liability, I'm guessing they defer to the most recent official recommendations. That would be the most reasonable due diligence that can be expected of them, especially given that GameFAQs is not a place to look for cutting-edge developments in medical practice.

kind9 posted...

My mom has COPD and she breathes just fine with a mask on. Anyone who claims they can't is a f***ing liar and an idiot

More accurately, they don't understand the issue. Masks objectively do not impede air flow. This has been quantified countless times by measuring blood oxygen saturation, including multiple studies that looked specifically at intense exercise. Having something covering the face, however, can induce a panic response because the body thinks it might be having trouble breathing. That, in turn, can lead to hyperventilation and/or bronchospasm, which do end up causing some issues.

It's a perfectly normal, reasonable instinct, but people need to see it for what it is so they can become more comfortable with it and overcome their anxiety, rather than trying to claim it's anything physically unavoidable.

Ironically (or not, because it's not really unexpected), them blockading the area is likely one of the major reasons they'll have trouble getting gas, since delivery trucks won't have been able to get in. It's almost like idling and pointlessly revving gas-guzzling trucks isn't a very good strategic choice >.>

I don't think Arizona is very hot in February. Maybe compared to parts of the world that get actual winter weather, but it's currently 11C in Phoenix. That's a cool spring day, not "very hot."

Now, I still wouldn't want a ski mask in 11-degree weather, but still.

LinkPizza posted...

Hes 20, but they still blurred out his face I understand blurring the baby (even though many look like almost the same in many cases)

Standard protocol for victims of sex crimes that were committed when they were minors. It's also why he isn't named. Around here, there was a particularly notorious case a decade ago where a 17-year-old girl was raped while drunk at a party, bullied horrifically after a video of the incident was circulated throughout her school, and ended up committing suicide. Her name was published pretty broadly during the campaign to have the incident properly investigated (spearheaded by her parents, who chose to publish it), but once charges were actually laid against her rapists, a publication ban came into effect and her name was no longer allowed to be said in the media, resulting in a whole lot of "a 17-year-old girl that we're not allowed to name but you all know who she is" sort of euphemisms.

It was very silly, with her parents objecting very strongly to the decision not to publish her name, and the judge presiding over the case (who's actually a member of my church) ultimately chose to blatantly ignore the ban in any public discussions of it because he felt the need to make a statement about how stupid and arbitrary it was in this particular case. Officially, I believe her name is still barred from being published, but I don't think any actual penalties have been levied against anyone violating that ban because of the pretty sizable movement to call it out for being stupid.

THEGODDAMNBATMA posted...

90% of most systems libraries isn't shovelware like the Wii's was.

That's never really been true. The Wii got a lot of *exclusive* shovelware because so many companies made cheap cash-ins on the gimmick potential, but the vast majority of games released are trash. This has been true pretty much forever.

SunWuKung420 posted...

I get personally attacked so much and the mods don't care.

Reality is not what you have been told it is.

jbomb1234 posted...

No one would have to because he is 20 now.

Somebody has to approve every marriage license, and I feel like this is very much a case where it could be said that one party was not competent enough to enter the contract. Granted, dude was 17 and it would all be perfectly fine if they'd waited a year (which means they should really probably have just waited a year), so it's not like he's been manipulated from a really vulnerable age into a relationship, but that still seems questionable to me.

While I understand what you mean, I still have to laugh at the idea of states that are further north being considered "deeper south."

Who approved a marriage license between her and the victim of the crime she was being charged with?

MartianManchild posted...

its early in the game.

It's very much not early in the game. "Early in the game" was several months ago. You're jumping on at roughly the same time as they go mainstream enough that the market is flooded with people like you that are looking to get in on this newest get-rich-quick scheme.

jbomb1234 posted...

Come to the south.

Uhh, she's in Arizona.

Basically, yeah. Historically, the RCMP were established with the express purpose of keeping the natives in line, and no small amount of that persists in their modern activities.

Jen0125 posted...

Gosh it's so odd to me that during the BLM protests police had no problems tear gassing us, shooting us with rubber bullets and marching us out of the city centers in riot gear.

But this? Crickets. Maybe because it's Canada? But what can the police do if they can't fucking break up an illegal protest like this? Like what are they for lol

The police here had no problems pepper spraying people protesting them forcibly clearing homeless encampments.

KodyKeir posted...

A splinter group has blockaded Alberta from the United States, forcing real truck drivers to divert through BC or Saskatchewan. RCMP were poised to remove them when an additional group arrived and swarmed the officers; RCMP pulled back to re-assess the situation. There are individuals on both sides of the border who did not plan on having their day ruined by the fringe right, and they have run out of food waiting to cross the border, it is unclear if any lodgings were provided to them.

In Ottawa, the main group is slowly breaking up as police are giving each individual the option to leave of their own free will, or have their truck moved for them, at their own expense.

Meanwhile, the RCMP has snipers set up within minutes of the start of any anti-pipeline protest. It also says a lot to look at how O'Toole reacted to the CN blockade (effectively "blockades are never an acceptable form of protest and this should be illegal!") compared to how he's responding to these blockades.

The meme potential for "Bone up!" is... considerable, to say the least.

Sahuagin posted...

it's plateauing because there is no scenario in which you don't asymptotically approach 100% vaccination. we are close to administering 1% vaccine doses percapita daily (in canada). anti-vaxxers or not, you will reach the limit very quickly at that rate. and again, we already have over twice the population in doses administered (and are still maintaining that rate, for now).

100% is never going to be a realistic goal, but we're stuck at like 80%. There's no inherent reason why we couldn't break that threshold and plateau at 99% or something like that, but we don't because of holdouts that refuse to get the jab.

We can expect another plateau as we get to the point where most of the people who got the first two have their booster, but again, that plateau is going to happen because of people who don't want #3, not because it's impossible to reach near-100%.

Sahuagin posted...

this doesn't make sense to me. I would say/guess omicron is not going anywhere. it will remain highly contagious; it will probably become less deadly (by taking out those who will die from it), but it's not going to disappear, how can it? it would have to be something like once you get it once, you never get it again, but that is not anywhere close to the case. if you know something I don't, let me know.

Omicron's weird. Because it's so different from Delta (and immunity to one doesn't confer meaningful immunity to the other), it's effectively operating as a parallel pandemic instead of competing. It's so aggressive, however, that it's infecting enormous numbers of people faster than the resultant immunity can fade (unlike basic Covid). That creates pockets of herd immunity, where it dies out locally because it struggles to find susceptible hosts. This is why it's in such sharp decline now, and the hope is that it will pretty much die out.

Straughan posted...

Just write a letter to the developer. Chances are you'll get a form letter, but you never know. I got a free copy of Fallout 3 GOTY for PC when I had a corrupted save file and game during one of the patches with all the separate digital dlc+my OG disc. They even gave me a digital license while it shipped.

Not to suggest that Bethesda is a small, passionate studio that genuinely cares about their customer base, but we are comparing them to EA here.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

No idea why you wouldn't just talk to people on the points they make with you, their racism isn't relevant to their request. You don't treat a murderer that's done their time like they want to kill you.

When the entire protest has been organized and fundraised for by a party that can basically be called the Canadian Nazi Party, it's kind of hard to separate the two. It's also kind of hard to not think about Nazis when the person you're talking to is waving a swastika flag around.

Decoy77 posted...

There is nothing racist about wanting to have a freedom of choice of what happens to your body

There is something racist about shouting racial slurs at anyone that isn't white and waving around swastikas, though. They're not racist because they don't want to get vaccinated, they're racist because they're being racist.

VideoboysaysCube posted... What I mean by zero measures is that there's no laws preventing you from refilling your soda cup more than once. Regardless of what they serve at school lunches, you can still go home and stuff your face full of Twinkies. The point is these people ultimately still have a choice of how to live their lives, despite the amount of harm they're doing to themselves.

Ultimately, yes. There are ways to get around whatever education, encouragement, and inconvenience measures are put in place. That doesn't mean they don't help, though. Even if people can go back for seconds, mandating smaller initial portions tends to reduce how much people eat because people are naturally inclined to feel obligated to finish everything on their plate. There are limits to that, of course (too small, and they'll still be hungry and go back for seconds. Too big, and they'll recognize their limits and pack up half of it to eat later), but there's a lot of psychology behind food and eating that can and is being manipulated. Unfortunately, most of that manipulation is coming from the marketing end (in favour of eating more and therefore buying more) and lobbying from those companies makes it harder for the government to push it in the other direction, but efforts are still being made.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

Also, obesity can be contagious in the sense that children of obese parents are incredibly likely to pick up their same habits.

While true, that's not really "contagious" in the sense that it warrants a major public health response. It needs to be addressed, certainly, and that's part of the goal of improving school lunches, phys ed programs, and teaching nutrition/cooking in schools, but it's not a matter of one obese person potentially causing everyone around them to become obese. Having a hard maximum on the disease's R value (the average number of new people a given case infects, which in this case is going to be limited to only the person's kids) makes it much less of a public health concern.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

Also, this is just speculation on my part, but if people in this country had better eating habits and actually used face masks consistently, we would never have suffered the amount of losses that we did. Take a country like Japan for example, where obesity is rare and everybody wears a mask. Their case to death ratio is .006%, whereas the U.S. is .01%.

I think you're absolutely right (though you divided by 100 one too many times, their actual CFR's are 0.7% and 1.6%, respectively). Fundamentally, Japan is a much more collectivist culture, while the US is more individualistic. It is normal there to take precautions to avoid getting other people sick, while so much of the US balks at the idea of being even remotely inconvenienced for anyone else's sake. That has very much contributed to the US having worse outcomes than many other countries, as has the worse average overall health.

VideoboysaysCube posted...

So basically, this country has issues, and Covid is just exposing some of them. Trying to mandate this particularly vaccine isn't going to fix the underlying issue.

It is not, that's correct. In an ideal world, the vaccine wouldn't need to be mandated. People would get it of their own accord in sufficient numbers to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduce the number of unvaccinated people to levels that would put the health care system at risk, assuming an Omicron was inevitable). Unfortunately, they haven't, due to a combination of that individualism (outright anti-collectivism, in many cases), the fearmongering and identity politics surrounding the vaccines, and a dash of legitimate concerns and skepticism that have been hard to address because of the other factors.

That has necessitated countermeasures, mostly to limit what the unvaxxed can do so they have fewer opportunities to get infected/infect others, with the secondary benefit of providing an incentive for them to take the plunge and render the issue moot. Vaccine mandates are not going to fix the underlying cultural and social issues that have turned this whole debacle into a worse problem than it needs to be, but they are going to mitigate the damage those problems can do (Omicron aside, though even then they're still better than nothing).

VideoboysaysCube posted...

What it really does is set a dangerous precedent moving forward. You have people supporting the denial of medical treatment for unvaccinated patients. What if somewhere down the line your health insurance decides not to cover something that they believe you could have prevented?

That already happens in a non-trivial number of cases (though more commonly it's people being denied new policies than being denied coverage within an existing policy). I fully expect that we're not far off of people's insurance premiums going up if they aren't vaccinated for Covid, not as part of any particular agenda, but simply because it's going to be more expensive to cover them on average.

That, I would say, is not a problem with pointing out how risky the unvaccinated are (realistically, insurance companies will make those decisions regardless of what people say, because that's simply how their business model works), but rather a problem with the US health care system at a fundamental level. That's a lot bigger than Covid.

I especially like the people who say "it's just a flu" as though the most recent public health crisis that was worse than this one wasn't actually influenza.

Good plan. Best of luck with the job hunt. By the sounds of things, you shouldn't have much trouble.

"I'm concerned that the vaccine might kill me and I'm willing to die to avoid taking that risk."

What a maroon.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

My understanding is that after a transplant the patient will be on immune suppressants for life to stave of rejection. What good is a vaccine going to do him either way?

Take this one to improve your immune response so you can be require take that one to stop your immune response.

His immune system will be more or less completely obliterated immediately before/after the transplant process, but after that it will be allowed to recover, albeit to a permanently weakened state. That's going to reduce its ability to respond to new threats in a timely fashion, so the more cells you can get producing antibodies before those threats show up, the better.

Basically, his immune system will be weaker, but still functional enough to benefit from the vaccine. Vaccines become even more important because his immune system will be weak enough to have trouble handling infections on its own.

That would make sense. I suspect the whole "high quality ingredients" thing drove up the price enough to turn off those looking for cheap TV dinners, but nobody that's actually looking for high-quality ingredients buys Kraft TV dinners from Walmart to get them, so they fell into a very low-demand middle ground. Martha Stewart ones may occupy a similar price/quality point, but they at least have branding that will help sell them (whereas Kraft is recognizable, but pretty much everyone's opinion on them is either neutral or negative).

Do the task, then quit later. If this is going to be a regular thing, you don't want to stick around, but you'll be in a better position to find a new job if you're still employed.

Revelation34 posted...

Apples also cost far more than 50 cents.

I just bought a 3 lb bag for $5.51 US, which is like 10 apples. That's *maybe* half of an apple on that plate, if not a quarter, so somewhere in the range of 15-25 cents worth of apple, if you were looking at buying it fresh. In practice, that's very obviously not fresh apple, and was likely diced up and thrown into the sugar sauce as much as a year or two ago, which makes it a lot cheaper for the company to produce it than including fresh apple would be, but comes with a very substantial loss of quality.

Ultimately, though, you are indeed going to struggle to find something comparable to that meal for 50 cents. Heck, you're going to struggle to find *that* meal for 50 cents, given that it's normally seven times that and Helly just found it on clearance (which probably means it's going to be hard to find it at all fairly soon, unless his Walmart just happened to find a buttload of nearly-expired ones in the back of their warehouse that they wanted to liquidate as quickly as possible). It's a lot easier than many people think to cook quality meals from scratch without spending more than something more processed would cost (especially if you have the initial capital to buy in bulk), but capitalizing on the occasional good deal in the clearance section can still save some money if you don't mind compromising on quality.

SinisterSlay posted...

It's too bad. O'Toole's less right approach nearly convinced me. But the capitulation to the crazies in his party kept me away.

Ironically, that fact that he didn't capitulate to the crazies enough is probably what cost him the election. The CPC has been trying to be more moderate in an effort to steal some of the Liberal vote, but they've got too much lingering resentment from the centre-left from Harper's shenanigans to sway them, and the PPC has snapped up the crazies that feel the party is too moderate for their tastes. Had he done a better job of picking a lane (that is, either explicitly hanging the crazies out to dry or embracing them wholeheartedly), he might have won.

You've made this topic at least two other times. At least change up the equation.

agesboy posted...

on the flip side, logistics had much larger capacities in general so it doesn't murder your frame rate quite as aggressively as trying a full logistics run of Factorio would (so instead of a main bus, when you expand, you can just order new mining nodes to supply and they're linked up with the supply system)
you also gain more tools to make belts up to 4x more compact (eventually by default as they exit out of logistics stations)
it's a different logistics problem to solve and I think it's pretty neato

Indeed. It's easy to fall into the trap of just trying to treat it like Round Factorio, but it is in fact a different game with different strategies. I expect it'll eventually get to the point of just having planet-sized blueprints for different purposes and stamping them down as the planet composition and my needs dictate, which is not entirely different from how Factorio works at the megabase scale (only with city blocks instead of planets and trains instead of spaceships), but it's definitely a different path to get there.

The_Viscount posted...

...what?

Unfortunately, the line "your sentences are like quilts" from a random Corner Gas episode seems to be too obscure to have a youtube clip available. It'd be a rather perfect response here.

That is kind of the impression I'm getting. It's kind of unfortunate, because I love the circular bus as a concept, but I can also already tell that a single belt of each product isn't exactly going to be able to sustain me as I start getting into making and using any of the materials red science unlocks. At least, not without some tricks to augment the bus' throughput, like creating buffer lanes before bringing in extra stuff that rejoin after branching a line off, but at that point I might as well just feed that incoming line into a factory of its own that makes whatever I was planning to branch off.

It's kind of got me wondering about making looped buses in Factorio to try and reap the benefits there, but given the width of Factorio's buses and how much the bus model struggles to scale up past the first couple rockets, I fear that path may lead only to madness. Of course, that's the perfect reason to do it. Even better if the first loop runs out of space and I have to expand it in some kind of deranged diagonal figure-8 pattern.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I'm feeling kinda dumb that didn't occur to me. I forget it's been 16 years since I was his age.

For what it's worth, I also assumed it was a physical acceptance package and am only now realizing the phrasing suggests an email. I feel your pain, fellow dinosaur.

The_Viscount posted...

Which I'm guessing is fucking nothing.

I mean, if a full ride was valued at ~$100k, $12k/year over four years is 48% of that. That still leaves a lot to cover, obviously, but it's nothing to sneeze at.

Leftovers are already made, by definition. You can't disagree with that any more than you can disagree with gravity. The packaging is less axiomatic, but you're also in complete control of how conveniently your leftovers are packed, so it's really your own fault if that's not true.

papercup posted...

I wonder if custard has ever heard the phrase "If you have 9 people at a table with a nazi, you have 10 nazis."

I will say that I don't think that's entirely fair. Depending on the context, not feeling comfortable calling out a Nazi for being a Nazi can be excusable. There are, of course, other times when it's not, and while failing to call them out doesn't necessarily mean you agree with them, it does mean you don't see them as a significant problem, and we've seen what happens when too many people don't think Nazis are a significant problem.

It's coming along. I've got a functioning early-game mall set up now and I've pretty much just started working on red science, which has come together much more quickly than I expected with the realization that X-ray cracking will make both components in the perfect ratios with minimal extra consideration (some spare hydrogen, but not so much that it's impractical to burn off or otherwise store until I can put it to better use), so my next session will consist of making 400 of them manually to rush that tech and then setting that up to keep progressing.

As is completely expected of my first factory, the spaghetti is real, but I fortunately saw the suggestion of making circular polar/tropical buses instead of the linear one I was ramping up to make, so I'll be transitioning into that in due course once I figure out exactly what I want. Not sure if it's best to go all-in on that idea or if it would be better to push for logistics and start expanding more aggressively, but if nothing else I really like the concept and aesthetics of a circular bus, so I think I will commit to playing around with the concept.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

May I suggest The Riftbreaker?

I tried the demo and had some fun without being able to get too deep into it, but it does indeed seem more like tower defense/ARPG with factory elements than a factory game in the same vein as Factorio et al. It does seem decent, so I don't want to dump on it for not being the same game as Factorio, but I don't think it scratches quite the same itch in terms of grand logistical challenges.

custard500011 posted...

Because it's all political. It's not about the virus. It's about control and power. It's about seeming virtuous over being honest and respecting the freedom of the people.

Alternatively, it's about appealing to people that want unrestricted freedom at any cost and ignoring all available science and data in the process. The whole "the government is just doing what they think looks best and not actually acting according to the situation" thing goes both ways, after all.

custard500011 posted...

(Primarily the capital because they have focus unlike BLM) But, M8 that's a protest. They want change, government won't listen, so they will make a stink until change happens. This has happened countless times in history. And this is terrorism then, this is the weakest form of terrorism ive ever seen. There's no violence It's clean for Christ's sake and all they're doing is causing traffic and honking horns all the time.

The fundamental basis of this is "if you don't change we're cutting off the country's supply lines." A protest is merely making your voice heard, sometimes being moderately inconvenient. That is a clear, unambiguous threat to the country's logistics for the sake of effecting political change through coercion. That's terrorism, yo.

custard500011 posted...

You're despicable and furthering the narrative that these people that only want freedom, and independence for themselves and their family, are terrorists and racists and violent rednecks.

adjl posted...

I will say, I am trying to keep an open mind and believe that the psychotic Nazis are probably a non-representative minority of an otherwise peaceful protest.

Oh hey covered that already. Whee!

custard500011 posted...

Watch a single live stream for more than 3 seconds and tell me what violence and hatred you see.

Robbing soup kitchens is pretty violent. Pooping on people's lawns is arguably violent. Demanding the alcoholic equivalent of protection money from bars is pretty violent. Shouting racist slurs at security guards is pretty violent and hateful. The entire protest being organized by overt white supremacists is pretty hateful.

Again, though, I'm willing to believe this is a minority that just stands out because of how utterly disgusting they are. I don't need to characterize the entire movement as being a bunch of violent Nazis to discredit it, though. I can do that by pointing out that it is, at its core, a terrorist movement (albeit one that isn't actually going to be able to make a significant dent, so they're very much overestimating their power and aren't likely to cause any serious problems), as well as explaining just how misguided and misinformed they are about the whole situation. Invoking the whole Nazi thing would just be an unnecessary bit of ad hominem.

custard500011 posted...

I should have the freedom to go to a bar without showing medical documents if I want.

Why? Is that some sort of inescapable need?

custard500011 posted...

A pandemic that ends at state and county lines. Pretty serious.

If you rely exclusively on what certain governments tell you to determine the gravity of the situation, sure. That's a pretty silly way to approach the issue, though.

So are leftovers.

SunWuKung420 posted...

You know all those Germans that went along with the Nazi party and believed everything they were told by their media and government, that's adjl in a nutshell.

See, now this is an appropriate place to use that book.

BlackScythe0 posted...

I think he has stopped talking because he doesn't know how to hide his real beliefs and keep himself from getting modded.

Just look at all the images he is posting, they are all nonsense and completely irrelevant to the topic at hand but he thinks he is annoying people and counts it as a victory.

Mostly, I don't think he can handle the reality that nothing about his position is actually valid. If he gives up posting memes and ignoring criticisms, he'd have to accept that reality.

helIy posted...

uh huh

so the answer is

no, ok

I mean, you bought 12 of them, so obviously spending $6 at once for food is an option. That makes your question pretty irrelevant.

Lokarin posted...

And these people, some of them may have died, get added to the "covid deaths while vaccinated" statistics without anyone knowing the wiser...

Heck, maybe we should pull a page from the Covid deniers' playbook and say that every "vaccinated" Covid hospitalization is actually somebody with a fraudulent vaccine record. That might be fun.

custard500011 posted...

We're all of the BLM protestors terrorists and criminals because some looted, vandalized and attacked people? Because by your reasoning that an entire group of thousands can be defined by a few people, then they are.

adjl posted...

I will say, I am trying to keep an open mind and believe that the psychotic Nazis are probably a non-representative minority of an otherwise peaceful protest. That is, after all, what happened with the BLM protests, with a whole bunch of people generalizing the violent minority to discredit the movement as a whole and avoid confronting the central message. The central message of this protest is still wrong, of course, and I will continue to disagree with it and argue against it wherever possible, but I want to try to avoid dismissing it all as just being the insane ramblings of racist vandals.

That said, they're making it really hard, especially where even the well-intentioned ones are still engaging in blatant terrorism (that is, "we're engineering a supply crisis unless we get the political change we want").

I'm sure they're not all Nazis pooping on war memorials and robbing soup kitchens. Heck, I'll even believe that the Nazis pooping on war memorials and robbing soup kitchens are a relatively small minority. That said, the entire protest is a strategic attempt to disrupt infrastructure to effect political change. They are holding as much of the country as they can hostage until they get what they want. That is the very definition of terrorism, so every single one - swastikas or not - can be called a terrorist.

helIy posted...

the only place that deserves them is prison

Preferably a single cell shared with everyone that bought one of these cards.

VideoboysaysCube posted... And here's the other side of the argument that everyone ignores...

Covid doesn't kill indiscriminately. Certain demographics are considerably more prone. The vaccine however is designed as a one-size-fits-all solution, which is never ideal when it comes to medical treatments. There are certain demographics that face higher risks with the vaccine than others. The odds are low, but there's still risk assessment.

The odds of having those serious side effects are higher from Covid itself than from the vaccine, though, even among the demographics that are generally at pretty low risk for Covid and are at highest risk of those effects. Across the board, the vaccines are safer than Covid. There is indeed risk assessment, but the actual numbers invariably yield the conclusion that vaccinating is the way to go (except for people with known allergies to vaccine components, who are typically medically exempt because being vaccinated would put them at greater risk).

VideoboysaysCube posted...

Just consider last year these vaccines were supposed to prevent infection. Now they merely mitigate the side effects.

Given that we've gone through four major new strains since the vaccines were developed, one of which has evolved particularly effective vaccine avoidance abilities (though the vaccine still prevents infection with Omicron, just much less reliably than for other variants and not well enough to lean on it as a primary public health strategy), that's not particularly surprising. That's not uncertainty, that's the expected progression of the disease (and would be regardless of vaccination progress, since viruses don't particularly discriminate between natural and vaccine-induced immunity).

VideoboysaysCube posted...

To make a simple point, illnesses derived from obesity is still the leading cause of death in this country. But there are zero measures in place to prevent obesity. Ask yourself why.

Because obesity isn't contagious, mostly. Not that "there are zero measures to prevent obesity" is a remotely factual statement. There are extensive anti-obesity measures being taken, including regulations on serving sizes (which have often been shot down by people that gobbled up industry propaganda like it was a 2-for-1 special on deep fried butter), pretty extensive health promotion campaigns, efforts to improve school lunches (remember when all the kids got mad at Michelle Obama because they wanted more cheeseburgers?), the mere existence of gym class... If you don't think anything's being done to combat the obesity epidemic, you haven't been paying attention.

SunWuKung420 posted...

In my experience, testing positive for covid without any symptoms pre-vaccination, and almost going to the hospital twice because of the vaccine, the vaccine was worse.

Basing any risk analyses on n=1, however, is generally a terrible idea. Unfortunately, humans overwhelmingly tend to bias their understanding of risks according to what they've personally experienced, so it can be really hard to convince people to believe in abstract statistical data over the tiny, non-representative sample they've observed. I try to be sympathetic to that, but it can get awfully difficult.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Stop prolonging my life against my wishes. It's up to me if the alternative is better.

Even if you are bent on dying (which, while I respect the right to die on your own terms, I think is more likely a mental health issue on your part than a competent wish for death, and I sincerely hope you can find the help you need to derive more enjoyment from your life), there are considerably more pleasant ways you could go than Covid. Bad Covid cases are extremely miserable.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Adjl also doesn't understand jokes.

I think the problem is more that you're kind of bad at making them.

helIy posted...

can i go

and buy all of that right now

for only fifty cents.

no, i can't, which is why breakdowns like that do not work, because it's always "if you spend $40 you can create something that maybe would be cheaper than this thing you can just buy right now for a fraction of the price as the other stuff"

You buy it for $40 now (28.33 USD, actually, and that's including delivery), then don't have to pay anything for the next 66 meals you get out of it (82 meals for the beans). If $40 all at once isn't feasible, split it up: Buy the bag of rice for $13, then split your 50 cent meal in half and supplement it with 4.25 oz of rice so you get two meals for 42 cents each. After 66 meals, you've saved $5.28. After four bags of rice, you've saved enough to buy beans instead of the KD. And that gets even better if I stop being lazy and convert those figures to USD so I'm comparing properly to that 50 cents (at 37 cents per meal, you're saving $10.66 over the course of a bag of beans, which is 37% of the cost of both bags).

Of course, all of this is ignoring that if you're in a position where you genuinely struggle to save up $40 to spend on 3-4 weeks of food, you're generally going to be able to tap into food banks, food stamps, and other support resources, making it even easier to reach that point of being sustainable.

Those breakdowns require a some capital, yes, but it's not really that much, and they can often be taken in more manageable steps. Even with the plan outlined above, you can make it even more affordable by splitting the first few bags with one or more other people (which means it takes longer to save the value of your own bag, but that's always the tradeoff). These breakdowns do work, you just can't expect to buy 18 kg of food at once without some long-term planning.

Technically speaking, "bulletproof vests prevent deaths" is true if they stop two or more deaths, even if they fail to prevent every other death.