511–520 of 557 posts
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I think it's nice to thank strangers who offer corrections. I'd rather be corrected than have a false feeling that I'm always correct.
Thats fine. Go forth and find your circle of Twitter users who share that view and correct them and receive corrections from them and be happy. Mr Stross seems not share that view. That's fine too.
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Excess deaths != Covid deaths. I listened to the podcast again and he said he conducted serology studies pre-vaccine that indicate an overall lethality of 0.2% but 0.05% for everyone who isn’t 70 years old or whatever. That’s detection of antibodies with 0.05% false positive rate and then a follow up on death early on in the pandemic. So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true.…
>So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit. Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to cal…
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How did you manage to get a race angle into this? And which "designs" and "covenants" are you talking about?
We are piling on tech companies that purport to care about climate and diversity and other such things while locating their HQ in Silicon Valley, which is obviously not the optimal strategy if those are really priorities. I refer to the [once legal] housing deeds that literally excluded sales to Blacks, developers who did not sell to Blacks as a way of marketing to whites, extreme zoning designed to limit working cla…
I live in a small community on the SFBA peninsula. Our property's original CC&R's (Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions) from 1929 specifically state: "Said property shall not at any time be occupied by any person or persons of the African, Mongolian or other Asiatic race, except as a domestic servant."
A few observations: (1) Obviously, these are no longer legal or enforceable; (2) my wife & daughter both fall into these restricted groups; they laughed when they saw them, but it was a pretty stark reminder of past incidents of discrimination; (3) This community and many others like it command a 30% dollar premium (good schools & city amenities) compared to neighboring communities without those legacy CC&Rs. Crazy how these differences propagate through time.
Bay Area definitely has its share of warts, though it doesn't hold a candle to some of the stuff we witnessed in the rural South.
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>So one might point out that I changed my number from 0.02 to 0.2 and this is true. But what’s also true is that there’s a huge difference between 4% and 0.2%. And I was right to point out that 1-4% is bullshit. Let's for a moment assume your source is correct. If you were "right" to call out someone's "bullshit" because they were an order of magnitude high in their numbers, do you recognize that we were right to cal…
Yes absolutely. But do you admit that when the other guy is more than an order of magnitude wrong (4%), that’s he is spreading bullshit even more than I was? And do you admit that nobody seems to call him out like they ought to? Maybe he would offer a swift correction like me and restore his honor and the whole situation could be better that way.
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Yes absolutely. But do you admit that when the other guy is more than an order of magnitude wrong (4%), that’s he is spreading bullshit even more than I was? And do you admit that nobody seems to call him out like they ought to? Maybe he would offer a swift correction like me and restore his honor and the whole situation could be better that way.
You keep on using the top of the estimate as if it was the only estimate. They said 1%-4%. I agree that is high, but I also don't think the real rate is 0.2% either as that requires the total COVID death number to be inflated. I don't think there is evidence for that. I think the real rate is probably somewhere in the in the 0.4%-0.8% range. That means the 1%-4% estimate is pretty close at the low end. And if we are…
> 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.
"Among patients" would make me assume that Stross is talking about case fatality rates, not infection fatality rates.
1-4% is a reasonable range for CFR, even if it's too high for IFR.
(Some quick Googling after the fact also shows that while MERS had a CFR in the 30-40% range, its IFR was estimated at more like 0.3-0.7% -- roughly the same range as COVID. Large numbers of undetected mild cases were cited as the reason for the large difference.)
I stopped reading when the author listed chicken pox alongside much more lethal childhood diseases. That said, I'm still pro vaccination for chicken pox, and went out of my way to get my child vaccinated even though it is extremely uncommon here in Belgium.
Please take a guess why chicken pox is uncommon in Belgium.
Chickenpox itself is certainly not uncommon- estimated at 113,000 cases per year, which is essentially the same number as the birth rate. In other words, every Belgian child can be expected to get chickenpox at some point.
Source here: https://adc.bmj.com/content/101/1/16
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Cars are a bad option for long-range transportation anyway. I'm not convinced at all by this argument.
That is true, but it's also true for EVs. Changing every car to EVs is missing the point. We need much better transport for both inter-city transportation, and for intra-continental goods transportation. EVs are just going to change the location of the pollution.
> "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…
Recharge time needs to be under 10 minutes or you have a pipe dream. 5-7 minutes would be better. Too many renters, condo owners, and small businesses with fleets don't have time to deal charging.
What's interesting about their design is that the end-to-end losses are within a couple percent of the end-to-end losses of a conductive charger (the losses move from the transformer to the induction coil).
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Its a shit rubbish reality that the only moderation option is infinite, is forever. Sever ties. End it. Write someone off as garbage. Your comment is way way too cancel culture for me. It hurts a lot having one bad exchange & having the door slammed in your face. Especially if it's some topic you feel strongly about, that you were trying to engage in. You may be right that it's a better tact than engaging. It's a shi…
>It's a shit system though, deeply dehumanizing ways of treating each other. The system was already deeply dehumanizing. "Block early, block often" is simply the inevitable and, frankly, only reasonable reaction to years of dealing with psychopaths, assholes and trolls on the internet. I only wish Hacker News came with its own killfile. Mine would be hundred of entries long by now.