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Oh, 2022

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Re: Oh, 2022

#151

Post by CamperBob2 »

josephcsible wrote: post #145
saalweachter wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.25% of the US has already died of COVID-19. It doesn't matter who said it, how can 0.02% be a reasonable estimate for the IFR of the disease?

This was already explained upthread: "the death count is exaggerated because the criteria for a Covid death is that a person is dead and also tests positive for Covid regardless of how the person really died."

This is a lie, likely a deliberate one.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-94-percent-covi...

You should go back to the person who told you this lie and ask them why they did it. A simple accounting of excess deaths ( https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm ) is all you need to dispel the notion of a 0.02% fatality rate.

Re: Oh, 2022

#152

Post by lazyasciiart »

Houshalter wrote: post #129
aftbit wrote: post #102

From the linked counterfactuals from 2017: >Quietly and without any fuss Ruth Bader Ginsberg has had a stroke: Pence indicates that her replacement will be a pro-life fundamentalist Christian. (Goodbye Roe v. Wade and, quite possibly, Griswold v. Connecticut.) Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.

Predicting the supreme court would become more conservative during a conservative presidency and senate was not a hard prediction. Ginsberg was known to be in poor health, but I guess you could count that as a successful prediction. But the other details are all wrong. There hasn't been a Protestant on the supreme court in awhile, let alone a fundamentalist.

Are you saying that Catholics can’t be pro-life fundamentalists? That’s definitely false.

Re: Oh, 2022

#153

Post by oblio »

barry-cotter wrote: post #133
ErikAugust wrote: post #76

“If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now—SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level. If SARS1 had gone pandemic we might plausibly have lost a billion people within two years.” That’s a sc…

Sweden exists. They never locked down. The Hong Kong flu of the 1950s[1] happened. It was a really bad flu season. Many, many old, very young and sick people died. Civilization was never in danger from COVID. Civilization survived smallpox. The Inca civilization came very close to surviving getting the entire old world disease package and being invaded by people with horses, iron weapons and gunpowder all in the spac…

The Incas had a very limited set of Old Worlders coming over, though. Not hundreds of flights per day.

Plus it depends on what you mean by civilization. What the Incas built was sophisticated but child's play compared to a modern civilization.

A SARS 1 global pandemic would have probably set back the entire world 50 years or more. Cities would have been abandoned, supply chains destroyed, most likely major wars started due to shortages.

Re: Oh, 2022

#154

Post by lazyasciiart »

sneak wrote: post #96
SavantIdiot wrote: post #21

> will be going into the cocktail of childhood vaccinations that Christianist preachers like to rail against, along with HPV. I think he's being too generous.

No, he's just taking pot shots at the Other, playing to the crowd with jargon and winks. Doctorow does it so much better, and while keeping it focused on the class war instead of the culture war. It's always a little jarring to see others (who are generally good at writing) try to do it in that style and fumble it, because Doctorow and Stephenson pioneered that tone so skillfully.

What makes you say that? You haven’t seen parents forbid their kids from getting HPV vaccines?

Re: Oh, 2022

#155

Post by ip26 »

elihu wrote: post #123

> "Looking further afield: it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for…

Cars don’t last as long as you’d think, on average. There will also be a knee in the curve where the ICE fleet drops below critical mass and gas stations start shutting down - and the harder it becomes to find a station, the faster people will switch.

Re: Oh, 2022

#156

Post by Ostrogodsky »

elkos wrote: post #2

Charlie Stross is a hard science fiction author, I believe his works (like Accelerado) have been quite influential and inspiring for many hn users. I believe it could be interesting to discuss his (pessimistic) take on this year.

No post body was provided.

Re: Oh, 2022

#157

Post by flyinglizard »

Overly simplistic, populistic and alarming.

The change against immigration is rooted in real problems found in immigration-heavy areas. See hotspots in Europe as an example. Countries have a duty to protect their borders and way of life, or else why have them in the first place?

No oil cabal pushes up asset prices, it’s the common people doing it to each other (hint: check the proportion of private owners in home ownership).

SpaceX is inconsequential, currently. Their effect on everyday life is nonexistent. What they did is launch for cheaper, not cheaply enough though as to make it a real commodity and drastically change what gets into orbit. Starlink though is potentially huge. That could end up as a whole new Internet of sorts.

It was neither Koch nor Mercer who destabilized politics. It was Facebook and the greater internet which removed elitist moderation and gave the people what they want (vs, apparently, what society needed. My favorite quote goes like “Facebook gave the people the means to connect without stopping to think what would happen when they inevitably do”). There was money and influence of all sorts in politics long before Koch and Mercer. You had Murdoch and Soros and many others. Yet nothing came close to what social networks did. Trump was not the product of any single billionaire.

Re: Oh, 2022

#158

Post by nostrademons »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #118

Do the rich, a ka "the klept" as he calls them, really suffer the most from unchecked immigration? It seems rather doubtful to me, as presumably immigrants would compete with and provide cheap labor?

Depends where we are in history. With functioning political and legal systems, police, public order, and general protection of property rights and taboo against violence, the rich benefit from immigration. It provides a more abundant, cheaper workforce, and societal institutions can prevent any negative consequences.

If those political institutions collapse, there is nothing scarier than an angry mob of starving people who are united with each other through a common culture, but disunited from you.

Re: Oh, 2022

#159

Post by xmprt »

I think just as his previous article might have been overly optimistic, this one is overly pessimistic. As the pendulum is in the process of swinging to the other extreme, I think we will see a lot of negative events slowing down now that people are seeing the negative consequences of their actions and try to revert course. For example, even though the world is tending towards a worst place in terms of things like climate change, I don't think we are accelerating there.

Re: Oh, 2022

#160

Post by extra88 »

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #131
supperburg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t need to show you, go listen to the Stanford professor. Lex Fridman podcast in the past week or two. Am I an idiot for believing a current Stanford professor? Is it not a reputable source?

> Lex Fridman (pronounced: Freedman) I'm an AI researcher working on autonomous vehicles, human-robot interaction, and machine learning at MIT and beyond. Honestly does not sound too reputable to me on this specific subject matter. Edit: I realize now that you are saying to listen to the podcast guest, not Lex Fridman himself. Is this the episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIOGUYOPAsA

Probably. From the episode description: "Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration."

"The Great Barrington Declaration […] advocated letting the virus spread in lower-risk groups with the aim of herd immunity, with "focused protection" of those most at risk." [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya

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