Lurker > adjl

Revelation34 posted...

Only if you don't know what the word stop means.

Do you know what "try" means?

MartianManchild posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/5/0/AAb2N0AAC3wK.jpg Terrorist could be added to this book title as well.

I'm calling them terrorists because they're literally engaging in terrorism: Forcibly causing large-scale harm/economic damage with the intent of coercing political change. Similarly, I'm calling them Nazis because they're waving swastikas around and espousing explicit white supremacist rhetoric. Were they not committing terrorism and not being Nazis, I would call them neither terrorists nor Nazis.

Apparently, there's a possibility that some people with boats are going to be blockading ports in solidarity. I don't see that taking off, mostly because nobody sailing anything that could overpower a tug boat is going to risk such an investment on such a stupid waste of time, but I'm still getting tired of all this terrorism.

Revelation34 posted...

Prevent is a synonym for stop.

And trying to stop something does not guarantee success.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

at work they have a video on loop saying if you catch the virus, you only have temporary immunity. then it acts like the vaccine gives permanent immunity, and you can't catch the virus if you get the vaccine....

That video sounds inaccurate, but that inaccuracy doesn't change the fact that being vaccinated significantly reduces your risk (at least as far as non-Omicron is concerned).

Not that I'm seeing anywhere. Prevention efforts aim for absolute success, certainly, but failing doesn't mean you weren't trying to prevent it.

Remember, when somebody tells you you're wrong, the best way to respond to that is to insult their physical fitness. Do not attempt to prove yourself right or demonstrate any semblance of basic intellectual capacity. That would just be a waste of time.

Revelation34 posted...

HornedLion said it prevents death.

Who said prevention has to be absolute?

MartianManchild posted...

https://www.ibtimes.com/10857-fully-vaccinated-americans-have-died-covid-19-30000-hospitalized-3326930

KEY POINTS
People aged 65 and older made up 85% of all breakthrough COVID-19 deaths
Hospitalizations among the fully vaccinated increased by 79% over two weeks
Unvaccinated residents are still more likely to test positive or die of COVID-19

Do you actually read the links you post, or do you just google headlines that sound like they agree with you?

Revelation34 posted...

They're 50 cents each. Good luck making an 8.5 ounce meal for 50 cents.

Long grain brown rice is $13 for an 8 kg (281.6 oz) bag at Costco. Black-eyed beans are $23 for a 10 kg (352 oz) bag. Split evenly (4.25 oz of each), that'd be 8.5 oz for 47 cents. Those are also Canadian prices and include delivery (I'm just going by the website, buying in-warehouse would be cheaper), so that's 37 cents US if we go just by the exchange rate, and even less with the in-store discounts. The water cost is negligible (~$1 per 1000L here, you'd have to work to use more than 10L), seasoning costs are pretty negligible (especially if you buy in bulk; grocery store spice bottles are a massive ripoff), and you've got something more nutritious for less money. Heck, there's enough left on that budget that you could even throw in a bit of vegetable to spice things up a bit.

Why does my calendar from last year say 2021 when it's 2022?

Veedrock- posted...

It is for me. Time to move on.

Unfortunately, you don't really get to decide whether or not a public health crisis is ongoing. What you're actually saying is "I want to pretend it's not happening."

Sahuagin posted...

canada has over 2 vaccines administered per person (percapita). of course it's "plateauing" there are only so many people.

They're not plateauing because of a lack of people, they're plateauing because the remainder refuse to get the shots. Canada's stuck just shy of 80% overall, climbing by about a tenth of a percent every couple weeks these days. There's still considerable room to improve (another 2 million people vaccinated would be a 25% reduction in the number of remaining unvaccinated people, since reductions see augmenting returns the closer you get to 100%).

Sahuagin posted...

meanwhile 1000 people are still dying weekly which is almost as bad as it ever has been.

Again, Omicron's an anomaly. Vaccination rates don't matter much for this wave. They help, but nowhere near enough to be the primary protective measure, despite most places and people being unwilling to revert to pre-vaccine restrictions. Between that and it being much, much more contagious than any previous variant, we've got an explosion of so many cases that deaths are breaking records despite the mortality rate on Omicron being much lower.

Fortunately, Omicron is temporary. This will pass on its own, probably before we see any of the updated Omicron-ready vaccines in arms (I believe Pfizer's is due in mid-March). In terms of overall casualties, the ideal would have been to enact new lockdowns to keep it in check until new vaccines were ready, but getting people on board with that would have been exceedingly difficult. Instead, Omicron's going to burn itself out because being this aggressive creates too much herd immunity to be sustainable, and we'll be back to primarily fighting vaccine-susceptible variants while also having a bunch of extra immunity to mutations that might help a new variant get around vaccines.

Unbridled9 posted...

I don't think that was it. I know her after all and that's not in character for her. I believe her reason for not doing so (I didn't exactly feel the need to ask) was more of not knowing where to get it at the time than something like that.

I can't necessarily speak for her specific experience, but from everything that I've understood about the vaccines' rollout, it hasn't exactly been difficult to figure out how/where to get an appointment and there have been plenty of resources available to advise those that are struggling with it. I strongly suspect that the more likely explanation is that she had some lingering anxiety about it (for whatever reason) that caused her to procrastinate sorting it out for long enough that she ended up finding an excuse to give up entirely, which she's now leaning on as her justification instead of admitting that she's scared. I don't guarantee that's the case, but that has been the rationale behind a lot of people holding the "I don't mind the vaccine, I just don't like that it's being mandated so I'm not going to get it" position: They feel ashamed to admit that they're hesitant, whatever their reasons for hesitating are, so they latch on to a reason that's easier to justify (most people agree that government overreach is a bad thing, even if they disagree on what exactly qualifies as "overreach") once one becomes available.

KodyKeir posted...

Take a couple of zeros off and that is far far more accurate. They had set up the crane shots hoping to get that many and then had to switch to shots from a low angle to avoid showing the enthusiasm that comes from a small group of people braving the January cold.

Technically, "up to 50,000 are going" doesn't not mean only 500 showed up...

Revelation34 posted...

Who cares?

I mean, this story is at least kind of entertaining. Duckbear's insistence on attaching a contrived poll to everything in his inexplicable quest to collect as much data on PotD's opinions as he can is particularly ridiculous here, but I got a chuckle out of how the story unfolded.

Depends what's causing those feelings. You can be unemployed and still have plenty on your plate. If you don't, but you still feel stressed/burnt out/overwhelmed, though, that's pretty likely to be a sign of some manner of underlying mental illness (specifically an anxiety disorder), so it'd be in your best interests to seek treatment for that if you can.

Gaawa_chan posted...

I might be wrong, but if I understand the situation between both Canada's restrictions AND the USA's restrictions...? This protest isn't even going to accomplish anything because the USA does not permit unvaccinated truckers across the border... so they're literally protesting over fucking nothing, lol.

Presumably, they'd take the same protest to Biden if they were successful in Canada and suddenly discovered they still couldn't cross the border freely, but yeah. These restrictions work both ways, and they're only trying to address one. This is pretty much nothing more than a couple of far-right politicians whipping their more extreme constituents into a frenzy so they can make a quick buck off of donations.

SunWuKung420 posted...

That is what vaccines do though.

The body reconfigures itself. Vaccines just give it some guidelines to do so.

Revelation34 posted...

Microsoft is not going to make the games exclusive for fucks sake. Why are gamers such paranoid morons?

They are, however, likely to expand GamePass' offerings with the new IP's they're acquiring, which makes purchasing those games at Gamestop less enticing and also means there will be fewer used copies being sold back to them (the bulk of their revenue).

mrduckbear posted...

this onc ein a lifetime chance will forever haunt him.

Unlikely. Ten years ago, the prospect of a random nobody getting to go to space was almost inconceivable. He's probably got at least 20-30 years left, and I expect he'll get more chances in that time.

SunWuKung420 posted...

How do you know adlj's points?

Probably because people that understand subtextual cues don't consider it to be a particularly obscure point. That, or it's a grand conspiracy where I'm pretending to be hundreds of different people simultaneously to trick you into doubting yourself and going insane, and I just slipped up and gave you a chance to unmask it. It's hard to say, really.

As they said, it was kind of inevitable regardless of Covid. Covid's hastened it along a bit, but the post-WWII Baby Boom happened 70-75 years ago. That means those people are getting toward the point of dying of simple old age. Covid's obviously throwing a wrinkle into it by killing a chunk of them off prematurely, but we can otherwise expect the death rate to accelerate for another 10-20 years.

On the flip side, birth rates are down partially because so many young people can't afford kids, and partially because many just plain don't want them and that's more socially acceptable now than ever before. Birth rates are especially low amid the considerable uncertainty of Covid, since a lot of families are holding off on having kids until things are more stable.

papercup posted...

I like how all this protest managed to do was turn canadians even further against conservative antivaxx psychos.

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").

MartianManchild posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/6/9/AAb2N0AAC3nF.jpg

Have you ever considered trying to make some Facebook friends that are *under* 60?

Sahuagin posted...

not up to speed on this issue, but "you must be vaccinated to cross the border" is not an unreasonable rule at all. and it sounds like it's not even that strict.

Bonus points where it's not even that. It's "if you aren't vaccinated, you'll need to be tested and isolate until your test results come back," which is exactly the same rule that everyone else has had to follow for months (and before vaccination rates got high enough to warrant vaccine-specific rules, everyone was required to test and isolate for 14 days). Commercial traffic has just been exempt from those rules until now because of how crippling such isolation periods would be. Now, with the vast majority of cross-border truckers vaccinated and the isolation period reduced, the impact is greatly reduced, so tightening restrictions to help close off that potential avenue for importing outbreaks is a lot more reasonable.

papercup posted...

If somebody came into my business and said "serve us for free or we'll hurt you" I'd start blasting.

It gets worse. Apparently a number of them went into the Ottawa food bank and demanded all of their food to feed the protest, so now the food bank has no food left because a bunch of Nazis got hungry.

Personally, I'm not a frozen food person because most of it tastes like poopy butt fart. Controlling the salt is just an added bonus.

faramir77 posted...

Antivaxxers especially are driven by multiple levels of fear.

And yet characterize wanting to actually do something about the worst public health crisis in a century as "fearmongering."

The most annoying thing is that their fear is very justifiable. The fact that they've been able to watch this vaccine emerge in real time in response to a crisis has been a really weird experience for people that don't understand how the process usually works (and why), and I fully understand that being unnerving. Instead of trying to understand the situation better so they can feel more comfortable with it, though, they accuse everyone else of being the scared ones, double down on anything that suggests that they're doing the right thing and are not acting out of fear at all, and refuse to change their mind because they've built that refusal into their personal identity.

I was going to say that that sounded interesting, but that was when I thought it was a homemade "KD hack," in which case I figured there was already enough effort going into making it that it'd be worthwhile to just make proper mac & cheese and have an even better product. But that's not the case.

That said, mac and cheese with italian sausage (or any ground meat seasoned like italian sausage) meatballs, sage, apples, and onions? With a parmesan- or Swiss-heavy sauce? That'd be awesome. Really, basically this recipe, only adapted into mac and cheese instead of squash:
https://www.wellplated.com/sausage-stuffed-acorn-squash/

Incidentally, that recipe is amazing. I'm not usually a squash guy, but that was an incredible couple of suppers. Would highly recommend.

The_Viscount posted...

Anyway, let's see if Canada can last without truckers.

"I like negotiating with terrorists."

Not that this will actually rob Canada of all of its truckers. It applies exclusively to cross-border travel and the vast majority of truckers are already vaccinated. The handful of holdouts are insignificant.

MartianManchild posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/5/4/AAb2N0AAC3b6.jpg

That comes more from the fact that's the whole thing is being funded by an explicitly white supremacist party (as in, part of their stated core philosophy includes the "advancement of the white aryan race") than from what any protesters are saying. All the swastikas certainly don't help that perception, though.

Unbridled9 posted...

Several of my friends and family do believe it works at least somewhat but are immensely opposed to the vaccine mandates and refusing to get vaccinated is their form of protest.

Principles with no basis in practicality are worthless. Principles at the expense of practicality are stupid. Principles at the expense of literal lives are evil.

Unbridled9 posted...

For example my mom was extremely eager to get the vaccine when it came out but then some mandate (I well forget which one) caused her to back off and now she's claiming I 'submitted to them' when I went and got it.

There was a pretty considerable period of time between when vaccines became available (especially for older people, and I'm guessing your mother is at least in her 50's) and any sort of mandate coming into effect. If she didn't get it before mandates started showing up, she wasn't actually that eager for it.

custard500011 posted...

You actually equated an injection to clothing and think it's a good point.

I said they're not at all equal. That's the opposite of equating.

custard500011 posted...

And this insane idea that there's only once choice in all of this is simply wrong.

Oh, there are two choices. One of them helps to control the public health crisis that has been ravaging the world for the past two years. One of them does not. That's not a difficult choice. There is a clear right and wrong there. Those that choose the wrong choice present a risk to those around them, so the consequence of that choice has to be to limit their ability to endanger others, which means limiting their access to public spaces (as much as is feasible without actually harming them).

custard500011 posted...

Any system or person who thinks that choice does not belong to the individual is wrong.

The choice does belong to the individual. Choices have consequences, though, and sometimes those consequences require further actions against the individual to limit the impact those consequences can have on people that didn't make the wrong choice.

Sahuagin posted...

I'm not anti-vax, and things could only be worse without it, but at the same time it sure is underwhelming in its effect. we've administered more doses of vaccine than there are people on the planet, and it still feels like it has done next to nothing. I don't know how/if things could be better though.

As disheartening as it seems, remember that Omicron is an anomaly. From fairly early on, epidemiologists were predicting that Omicron hitting us as hard and fast as it did meant it would burn itself out quickly, and that's exactly what we're seeing. A virus simply can't maintain case counts like that indefinitely without creating too many clusters of herd immunity to sustain itself. It's more than a little scary to realize that it's this easy for a vaccine-avoidant variant to show up with no warning (ignoring for a moment that numerous countries had detected Omicron months before South Africa announced it and just chose to say nothing because they didn't want to look bad, robbing us of the ample warning we could have had), but this doesn't actually do anything to set us back in the fight against regular Covid.

As much as an estimated 40,000 new Delta cases a day is still a lot, that's still much, much better than the third wave from Nov 2020 to February 2021, and the fourth wave (Aug 2021-Oct 2021) was also considerably improved. That improvement comes in spite of people (vaxxed and unvaxxed alike) eschewing restrictions en masse, which is a testament to just how much the vaccine has achieved. Improving vaccination rates will continue to help with that, especially if better efforts are made to get vaccines to under-vaccinated regions to reduce the risk of new variants emerging and giving us another Omicron (though variants on Omicron itself aren't likely to be very successful, given how widespread natural immunity is to the base Omicron strain).

The problem, of course, is that vaccination rates are plateauing pretty hard, thanks to a very staunch group of people that refuses to stop being afraid of them. Those people have latched on to the vaccines' ineffectiveness against Omicron as evidence for their belief that the vaccines don't work at all, so getting them on board with crushing Delta is going to be a major challenge.

custard500011 posted...

Equating clothing with an injection is stupid.

I agree. Clothing is far more expensive, requires a non-trivial amount of time, money, and energy to maintain, and really doesn't provide much benefit to those around you once you've achieved the bare minimum of covering your butthole so you don't smear poop residue on whatever you sit on. By contrast, vaccines are very cheap (if you have to pay for them at all), require pretty much no further action or upkeep beyond a day or two of side effects, and reduces the risk of getting other people sick or even killing them. Needing to wear clothing is obviously way worse than needing to get vaccinated. They're not even comparable.

custard500011 posted...

It's like you people like being told what to do.

I can't necessarily speak for everyone else, but I'm pretty neutral on being told what to do. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's harmful, sometimes it's redundant... Given that I'm not a rebellious teenager, I don't define my personal identity on a basis of rejecting authority.

In this particular case, I got the shot long before any sort of mandates were even being considered, so it makes absolutely no difference to me that they're telling me to get vaccinated. I am, however, glad that they're telling all the people who were too stupid to make the right decision on their own what to do, since apparently that's necessary.

custard500011 posted...

You cant un inject yourself.

Fortunately, that's not really something anyone actually ever needs to do. If you end up with an adverse reaction (which is quite rare), that's generally easy enough to address by applying additional treatments, with no need to un-inject anything.

custard500011 posted...

Not the non existant mandates for a the other vaccinations.

adjl posted...

Workers in many professions have been required to have vaccines for roughly as long as vaccines have existed, whenever not being vaccinated presents a risk to their clients, the public, their colleagues, or their ability to continue doing their work. You can't even start med school in Canada without proof of most childhood vaccines, plus TB immunity.

Try to keep up.

custard500011 posted...

because they'd be forcing people to get injected with something to go to a bar. lots public safety measures are variants of "don't do this". the mandates are "you must do this". it's extremely invasive.

Plenty of public safety measures also demand that you do things. Requiring food service workers to wash their hands, for example, or welders to put up screens to protect passers-by from the light. Sometimes, ensuring people's safety does require an action.

Alternatively, if you'd rather frame everything as "don't do this" for some arbitrary reason, you can frame vaccine mandates as "don't go to a bar without being vaccinated."

The_Viscount posted...

I feel like I seriously missed out if this is a good sample of his work. These are amusing in a bizarre way.

The captions were lifted verbatim from actual Sophie posts, to make them seem even weirder.

custard500011 posted...

The government should not mandate what medicine an individual needs to take. It's none of the governments business.

Public safety is absolutely the government's business. That's why a considerable portion of the laws we have exist. Why should vaccines be exempt from that?

custard500011 posted...

based truckers. the mandates were horrible from day one and I'm glad to see all this massive pushback.

"Day one" for vaccine mandates was before you were born. Workers in many professions have been required to have vaccines for roughly as long as vaccines have existed, whenever not being vaccinated presents a risk to their clients, the public, their colleagues, or their ability to continue doing their work. You can't even start med school in Canada without proof of most childhood vaccines, plus TB immunity.

The only thing that's new with Covid is that Covid spreads so rapidly that it's become an occupational health issue for other professions as well, and a bunch of idiots have adopted their refusal to get vaccinated as a matter of personal and political identity and therefore refuse to change their minds in the face of new information. Even that's nothing new: The US Supreme Court ruled in favour of vaccine mandates in the early 1900's for the purpose of trying to get smallpox under control.

Jelly salad and tossed salad.

Sahuagin posted...

but statistically there's phenomenally more covid spread right now than ever, and about as many deaths as ever.

What gets me are the people that are like "the vaccine doesn't work against Omicron, and that's 95% of the cases in the US right now!" The Omicron wave peaked in the US at a 7-day average of over 800,000 cases a day. At 95% Omicron, that still means 40,000 non-Omicron cases a day, which is roughly on par with the daily case count for the second wave back in July 2020. Omicron is overwhelmingly dominant right now, but it has achieved that on top of other variants, not by replacing them, so there will still be plenty of value in the vaccines once Omicron finished burning itself out (to say nothing of the protection they do offer against Omicron, however limited it might be).

Unbridled9 posted...

Like I said, lots of religion + pro-abstinence training

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273920886_Can_Sex_Education_Delay_Early_Sexual_Debut

Pro-abstinence training tends to result in earlier sex, not later. What's worse, it tends to be sex where neither partner knows anything about birth control or STI's, so you get higher STI rates and teen pregnancy rates in areas that prioritize abstinence over comprehensive sex ed.

It's not impossible that your cohort actually did end up waiting until they were older, but that's very much the exception, not the norm, especially when they're being over the head with "if you have sex you'll get pregnant and die."

Exclusively. I can't be bothered to remember to charge wireless ones.

MartianManchild posted...

Im going to get into NFTs because of how much you guys are bitching and complaining about them. I remember years ago, most of you complaining about bitcoin and how big of a scam that is. Imagine if you actually bought some all those years ago lmao.

Generally speaking, "I'm going to invest in this just because my peers think it's a stupid idea" is a very, very bad investment strategy.

helIy posted...

and, as what typically happens in RMT situations, is that the item(s) are going to be bound on use, so you cannot ever sell it like they claim you could

Ultimately, they want sales to happen so they can take a cut of them, so I don't know how much bind-on-use there's going to be. If they're hoping for people to resell stuff they've bought, binding would be counterproductive to that goal, so what I think is more likely is that high-demand items will only be available for a short period of time. If they drop forever and aren't consumed, the supply will eventually outstrip the demand and their value will drop, but if they can only be sold once, that limits their potential profit. Instead, artificially capping the supply keeps demand high while still allowing indefinite resale.

In practice, I expect what will happen is that gameplay items will drop normally but bind on use, with gradual power creep to keep people grinding and buying new stuff, while cosmetics will be infinitely tradeable but only available for a limited time. The cosmetic market is probably where most of the money is anyway, if TF2 is anything to go by.

Zeus posted...

>Says no cherrypicking
>Advances an outrageously cherrypicked excuse

He was specifically responding to the example given.

Zeus posted...

...that's not what it f***ing is. You're just completely redefining s***.

And how would you define it? Bear in mind that (in case me explicitly indicating that I was doing so didn't make it clear enough) I distilled the concept down to the ultimate relationship between the attitude and the practical consequence, so if you give a definition that has not been similarly distilled, be aware that there's a good chance I'll distill it for you and end up right back where I started.

Zeus posted...

Either that's hyperbolic or hyper... well, drawing a blank on the word. Anyway, I'm probably calling bulls*** on it being that high. That might be the number of students who wish they were sexually active, but it's probably not the number.

https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/content/uploads/sites/10/2016/01/SSuN-Fact-Sheet-Age1stSex-04-10-13.pdf

A single study is hardly conclusive, but that's finding 23.7% of guys had sex by age 13. 51.2% had done so by age 15 (grade 9), along with 47.3% of girls. That's obviously lower than my estimate for grade 7, but not by that much. and it roughly tracks for grade 8. I also went to a school that covered one of the city's major public housing neighbourhoods and therefore had more black students than the general population's demographics would suggest, and I would expect that to bring the average down based on the racial stats there (and, less concretely, cultural differences among lower-SES groups).

Again, mine is a very rough, anecdotal estimate, so drawing any broader statistical conclusions from it would be silly, but the fact of the matter is that a significant number of people are sexually active by grade 8.

Unbridled9 posted...

Or, ya know, I decided to remain abstinent until marriage? That IS a thing, especially among religious families (of which I am a part of). Either way, the most 'sexual' anyone in my friend group got was a lesbian girl hitting on other girls (who weren't interested.) The boys did their own thing and the girls kept true to the upbringing.

I can almost guarantee that more of your peers were sexually active than you thought, and probably even younger than the general average. They just didn't admit to it because the local culture pressured them into being ashamed of that.

Revelation34 posted...

It actually can't but you can believe it does.

If you think there's something wrong with my rationale, you're welcome to point it out. If you can't point out anything wrong with my rationale, then you shouldn't believe that I'm wrong.

Unbridled9 posted...

Yea... I'm gonna call that a 'no'. Least not regularly. Boys are just starting to discover that girls don't have cooties and maybe want to do things with them while girls usually aren't that interested at that age. Maybe when they're 15 to 16 and even then it's hardly them just f***ing all the time (else teen pregnancy would be through the roof). Either way, I do think it's reasonable enough.

I can't say that I have any concrete figures, given that I was not part of the group in question, but I'd estimate that a solid third (if not half) of my grade 7 class (12-13) was sexually active. Obviously, that's anecdotal, a very rough estimate, and too small a sample size to make any major generalizations, but the fact remains that sex in grade 8 is not that uncommon, even if it's not necessarily enough of a majority to be the norm. And that's looking specifically at intercourse, so even those that didn't go that far until later were often engaging in other sexual activity well before doing so.

In theory, vaccine-avoidant variants are likely to be relatively mild, like Omicron. The vaccines that Omicron is avoiding specifically target the spike protein that's responsible for a lot of the worst of Covid's pathology, so for a variant to avoid them, that spike protein has to mutate beyond what the immune system is able to recognize, which can be expected to reduce the severity of the disease.

In practice, that's not a guarantee, and as much as people like to cling to the "viruses tend to evolve to be less deadly" idea, that's far from foolproof, especially when dealing with a virus that has such a high asymptomatic transmission rate (and therefore relatively little selective pressure against lethality). There is still a very real possibility that we'll get another Delta (not that Delta's gone anywhere, since Omicron is different enough to not compete directly against it) and see a variant that avoids some of the vaccine's protection but is significantly more dangerous than previous variants. So long as significant portions of the world remain unvaccinated (keeping overall case rates high), that remains a considerable risk.

MartianManchild posted...

Some of his merch is incredible. Debating on getting the Freedom over Fauci flip flops or the Lockdown Libs Tour Tee. Maybe both!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/0/6/AAb2N0AAC3Am.jpg

"People trying to stop Covid are just trying to profit from doing so."

kind9 posted...

Remind me, why do people hate Fauci so much? Is it because he changed his mind on some things?

Mostly, because he keeps saying Americans shouldn't just bend over and take a Covid enema. A rather large number of people are inexplicably enamoured with that idea.

helIy posted...

lol

these vaccines are currently the most thoroughly tested vaccines in the history of mankind right now

It's true. I get the early skepticism, and shared in it myself, but there's just so much data out there now and so many people subjecting these things to such unprecedented scrutiny that if major problems haven't shown up by now, it's very safe to assume they never will. The 10,000,000,001st dose isn't going to have any effects that the other 10,000,000,000 didn't.

It's officially-sanctioned RMT with a greater degree of publisher control. It's nothing new on the player's end, it's just easier for the studio to capitalize on it. Official RMT is relatively new in the AAA space, though (Diablo 3's attempt was quite some time ago, TF2, DotA 2, and CS:GO are largely unknown to the console gamers that drive so much of the AAA market, and those are all of the high-profile examples I can think of), so they're able to attach the popular buzzword that is "NFT" to it and convince people that it's something revolutionary that will definitely benefit them and totally won't just result in a clearly inferior game experience for those that don't want to spend more than $70 on their game.

I especially like the "Sell stuff when you're finished playing the game" claim. That guy knows damn well they'll be designing these games to keep as many players as possible playing them until they release another one and jettison the old version (and the value of their "earnings" along with it).

Zeus posted...

So the problem isn't COVID, but hospitals' refusal to provide adequate treatment?

Transplants are generally refused to people that stand a significant chance of not surviving for very long post-transplant. Given that transplant recipients have their immune systems nuked prior to the transplant and suppressed for the rest of their lives, not being vaccinated against a deadly pandemic puts him at extremely high risk of wasting the heart. So they give it to somebody that will be more likely to be able to use it.

It's not a question of adequate care, it's a question of using an extremely limited resource to do the most good possible. Those resources are significantly more likely to be wasted in unvaccinated patients than vaccinated (especially where the vast majority of people that are still unvaccinated at this point aren't exactly lining up to comply with other precautions, putting them at even greater risk), so the unvaccinated are passed over.

To put it in terms you're more likely to agree with, would you give a heart transplant to an unrepentant alcoholic?

ReturnOfFa posted...

The twilight-zone style coverage of this has been fucking embarrassing. "This isn't being covered!" It's on every Canadian news outlet every single fucking day. Shut the hell up.

Everybody supporting this convoy should embarrassed.

It's really kind of sad how many people can't feel worthwhile unless they feel like they and their opinions/beliefs are being persecuted.