111–120 of 134 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which one was the second one? I'm assuming the first and third are the Great Recession and Covid.
Millennial bingo: 2008 financial crisis 2020 pandemic (& Brexit) 2022 war start + highest winter temperatures ever recorded 2023 economic downturn and layoffs Who knows what the future holds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people have the boring kind of sex where you do not consume the flesh of your partner.
Do you get bird flu from eating birds? That doesn't make sense. Does anyone eat raw birds? Wouldn't you just get it from being around birds?
Imagine a bucket of raw inverted chicken lungs.
Ew.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It remained a non-event for the vast majority of the population because the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign. If a little extra screen time in the media made that campaign successful it paid dividends for public health, imo.
the most vulnerable proportion of the population participated in a widespread vaccination campaign It looks like about 425k men were fully vaccinated, and another 250k got a single vaccine. That's not amazing compliance if you assume the vulnerable population is somewhere in the 3-16 million range. https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/response/2022/vaccines_dat...
The subset of gay men having unprotected sex with many partners is significantly smaller than the total population of gay men (about 7 million in the US).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to live in Brisbane which had two "one in 100 year" floods in relatively quick succession: 2011 and 2022. When the second one came there was some talk about communicating the risk more effectively. Instead of saying "one in 100 year" it would be better to say there is like, a 0.2% chance of major flooding every year.
In what sense is 'one in 100 year' equivalent to '0.2% every year'? With the latter you'd expect 0.2 of them in 100 years? (Totally agree the phrasing is misleading to the layman though, which is really the only reason for it to exist anyway, in an attempt to be more relatable.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on. There continued to be misleading and fearmongering reporting for weeks and months after that was obvious, because of the well-known phenomenon where media gets more clicks and eyeballs if the "news" is bad. Also, Covid doomers really wanted a 2nd thing to be depressed about.
>Monkeypox was pretty clearly a non-event for the vast majority of the population pretty early on Just like how it's pretty clear that the coronavirus wasn't "a global emergency"? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/health/china-virus-who-em...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The viral jump from animals to humans I thought the most likely origin of Covid-19 is a lab leak (at least according to the latest from the DOE and the FBI), likely from gain-of-function research gone wrong?
No – even that DOE report gave it a low probability ranking. It’s perfect for conspiracy mongers because you can’t completely rule out the possibility but the evidence has pretty consistently pointed at a non-lab jump, possibly in the wet market, and that’s not surprising since it’s a common scenario scientists have been warning about for decades. See for example this recent analysis: https://zenodo.org/record/775429…
I thought we were watching H5N1 which showed up in some humans in Cambodia last month?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vaccines and mass masking work. Lockdowns not so much: "Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm the notion that lockdowns – at least in the spring of 2020 – had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2% co…
What are the plausible explanations for how strict lockdowns wouldn't significantly slow down infections for a respiratory disease? Is it basically just that the lockdown strictness, duration, and enforcement is never sufficient to make a difference for such a highly contagious disease? Like there basically isn't a sufficient decrease in the number of person-to-person contacts to meaningfully change the end result of…
That's why ventilation works so well, it replaces the air with air that doesn't have the virus in it, then sunlight kills the virus sent outside.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Vaccines and mass masking work. Lockdowns not so much: "Overall, our meta-analysis fails to confirm the notion that lockdowns – at least in the spring of 2020 – had a large, significant effect on mortality rates. Studies examining the relationship between lockdown strictness (based on the OxCGRT stringency index) find that the average lockdown in Europe and the United States only reduced COVID-19 mortality by 3.2% co…
The problem with these sorts of debates is that someone comes along and dumps a reference from a single opinionated, controversial paper that they've seen somewhere and declares that something is the absolute truth.
Here's a reference with quotes from scientists disputing that paper with a lot of links to papers showing a different conclusion.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-a-prep...