NoPie

From another perspective – she wants to restore democracy in her country and wishes it again to become a prosperous society with growing economy.

And perhaps your attitude is why it is more globally relevant than many people think. Many countries have fallen into this lack of democracy that needs to be restored. Cuba is the closest example.

If m-dashes becomes a turn off, GPT users will simply replace them with hyphens and using m-dashes will become a sign of real professionalism or alternatively a sing of completely clueless.

It is actually stupid to adjust to writing without m-dashes because one can easily replace all m-dashes to hyphens in chatGPT generated text. I predict that obsession with detecting chatGPT by m-dashes will be short-lived because it will be exploited as soon as it will have any real world consequences.

The RTCs didn't find significant difference between N95 and surgical masks in hospital settings.

How can a request for evidence be absurd?

That applies only to lab conditions. No RCTs have found much effectiveness so far in real life.

We now know that masks were barely effective or not effective at all. They could even be net negative by causing people to take more risks.

Isolating was the only way. A lot of elderly in the UK did this successfully and never got covid. Lockdowns, masks and schools closures did not affect the spread significantly. We know this because Sweden did not mandate these things and had about the same amount of people getting covid until vaccines arrived. The benefits were that Sweden had less mortality from other causes.

I was actually commenting for Herman Cain. Sorry, for this mistake.

Yes, they made announcements without clearly thinking how they will be perceived. I agree that it was unnecessary and then dying suddenly didn't look good.

Nevertheless, if I had a situation like where I know for sure that my odds are not great, I would do the same. I would live full life today because tomorrow I could be dead. Herman Cain most likely knew that he is not going to last long. It didn't make sense for him to be afraid of death and isolate for indefinite period of time. His bravery is an example to follow.

The problem with this is that he had been diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer in 2006. It is rare for a person with stage IV cancer to survive for another 14 years. He received treatment but most likely eventually he would have died anyway. Covid may have fastened his demise but his odds of dying were quite high even without covid.

It's actually quite clever from the part of the scientist.

The incentive would be money, maybe the pay for doing this test was not good enough.

Or maybe the scientist was motivated by thirst of discovering something good for humanity like cure for cancer and didn't want to get distracted by other things. Funding is also needed but angel bones are clearly impossibility. Why even spend time on disproving that? But if she had engaged in discussion with people clearly believing in this nonsense it would have taken too much time. Saying, the tests are inconclusive lets her be distanced from all this and allow people to leave her alone, mostly that the groups will continue their disputes among themselves.

sic transit gloria mundis https://archive.is/VZDDN

I cannot believe they wrote this in 2022 when it was all clear that covid doesn't matter for children and had already become endemic.

Santa Cruz where most of the local population lives gets half of its water from desalination plant.

Desalination is already cost-effective and can provide water for tourists if needed. They would just need to build a desalination plant in the south.

Electricity already is largely generated by wind, solar and tide.

Air transportation probably causes the biggest pollution.

Apart from that such tourism is very sustainable. It provides value to people who need to go on holidays. It doesn't matter if the food and necessities are imported because tourists would have consumed the food anyway if they had stayed at home.

While it causes unsustainable rent increases to local population, that can be managed somehow. Maybe give subsidies to them by using the profits from tourism. Tourism tax is not unusual invention in many places.

I find him more relatable than most musicians, journalists and actors.

What do you mean by high bar? Cochrane group are specialists who do exactly that and provide gold standard of evidence. Sometimes the evidence goes against accepted wisdom. That's how science work.

> That's one paper out of dozens, feel free to pick another.

It is not. It is the review of all available evidence (studies).

> If the claim masks don't work didn't come from the same people who said isolating didn't work, I might take them seriously.

It didn't. The claim came from Cochrane group.

So, are you taking it seriously now?

If we already have strong evidence that the current vaccine is effective, then I agree, we don't need to to do another placebo controlled studies. But very often in medicine we don't have any evidence besides our beliefs.

I agree, they are not politicians. However, they are deciding policy and that means their job is political.

Actually we could. Maybe we won't do such studies because they are irrelevant because avoiding spitting into the surgical opening is a reason good enough. But then we cannot claim that masks during the surgery prevent the spread of airborne viral diseases.

But if we needed to guard for them and the good evidence is lacking, then not testing would be unethical.

Yes, even covid vaccine today could be compared with placebo, for example, in children. Europe never mandated covid vaccine for children and today in the UK they cannot even get the vaccine unless in a risk group. The US however recommends covid vaccine for children without the evidence that it makes any difference today. It definitely should be tested in trials before such recommendations.

I don't think that IRB would reject such studies. At the start of pandemic everybody was saying that doing human challenge trials by infecting healthy volunteers would be unethical. And yet the UK did them. The red tape takes time and I can understand that during pandemics we may need to act quickly and cannot test everything. But in principle we can and do need to all kinds of trials to obtain proper evidence.

That's not accurate. Obviously there are many different studies with different conclusions. But by “evidence” we usually mean the total conclusion from all of them. In medicine it is usually done via metareviews and even then evidence can be graded to different levels and quality.

So, in short, Cochrane review shows that we don't have a good quality evidence that masks were effective. And the low quality evidence indicates that masks either had no or very little effect. Some people try to quote one or two studies out of context but that's not helpful because we need to take the totality of evidence into account.

It is possible that once we obtain high quality evidence, these conclusions will be overturned. Surprisingly there is very little interest in doing such studies.

I understand how public can misunderstand this phrase but scientifically it is clear and justified.

Sometimes “no evidence” means that we haven't found compelling evidence yet. Some people are desperate and want all the studies to be done immediately and evaluate the risk if the theory is real or not.

But for scientists the desire to reach certain outcome is actually counterproductive as it can introduce bias. Slower and less passionate process can lead to better results.

For example:

1) We had no evidence of covid being airborne and then we found this evidence.

2) We had no evidence that masks help and then we found no evidence.

Two different theories, two different outcomes. Covid is airborne and it changes our understanding (however, we gradually realized that it is impossible to limit the spread and all the measures ultimately were useless). And that masks most likely had very little effect.

The reporters could write better for lay public explaining that “no evidence” means that currently we don't have evidence but it could be found later or that “no evidence” is actually that we have a lot of evidence that is indicating in some other direction and the chance of new evidence that rejects those findings is smaller but still could happen.

I understand how public can misunderstand this phrase but scientifically it is clear and justified.

I looking at that page and sometimes “no evidence” means that we haven't found the evidence yet. Some people are desperate and want all the studies done immediately. They evaluate the risk if the theory is real or not.

But for scientists the desire to reach certain outcome is actually counterproductive as it can introduce bias.

1) We had no evidence of covid being airborne and then we found this evidence.

2) We had no evidence that masks help and then we found no evidence.

Two different theories, two different outcomes.

The reporters could write better for lay public explaining that “no evidence” means that currently we don't have evidence but could be found later or that “no evidence” is actually that we have a lot of evidence that is indicating in some other direction and the chances of new evidence that rejects those findings are smaller but still could happen.

The important conclusion here is that Russia tried to influence the Baltic States by political destabilization (they had plans for Russia as a second official language, reducing importance of NATO) and it failed.

Russia seemed to have more success in Ukraine but ultimately they also failed when Ukraine appeared moving towards the West. That's why Russia ultimately decided to start a military operation, i.e., a war.

Of course, you could think that Russia would never dare to start a war with a NATO countries. Definitely the risk is lower. But we didn't believe it would start a war in Ukraine either. It is possible that any country can experience some kind of political destabilization (even without meddling by Russia) and they Russia could use the opportunity. So, it is important to be ready.

Ukraine and Baltic countries are not the same. This comparison is false.

No wonder the whole world went mad and demanded vaccine mandates for vaccine that does not even prevent the spread of infection. Too much reliance on “experts” that repeat mindlessly “vaccines good” instead of looking into details of a particular vaccine.

Is it? Everybody is an expert online. My trust in those experts is 0.

Russia had no military strength to take over Kyiv and yet it tried to do that. Intelligence tried to warn about that and most European governments ignored that.

The theory is that Russia has nothing to lose. Their plan may not be to win but to force the breakdown of NATO. If attacking the Baltic countries will not provoke immediate reaction from NATO, it would mean that NATO was empty promises.

Or maybe this warning is false. We have no way of knowing but it makes sense to be prepared for this eventuality.

Diazepam can sometimes cause people to act like that. They are not sleeping but are completely on autopilot, even driving a car etc. and afterwards they don't remember what they were doing.

Some people are afraid to fly and use diazepam to reduce anxiety.

It might not be what happened here but this would be my first assumption. He somehow got on the wrong flight and lost his memory due to use of drugs or stress.

I don't think that there is a big mystery. He might have lost his memory due to stress, fatigue, lack of sleep, use of drugs (such as diazepam) etc.

Maybe he was supposed to change flights in Copenhagen to somewhere else, to Russia or Israel but in his confused state he lost his passport at the airport after the security check. Then tried to board his airplane and somehow managed to board another airplane. The airport workers and flight attendants are supposed to guard for such cases but sometimes they also make mistakes and don't notice someone walking into restricted area etc. It happens, very rarely but happens even in the best guarded airports.

Lithium (an active substance) is a drug, Priadel (a brand version of lithium carbonate) is a medicine.

Drug and medicine is specifically distinguished in medical science. But again, in many contexts this distinction doesn't matter and most people don't even know the difference. It doesn't mean that we have no idea what is a drug or what is a medicine.

It just shows that precise definitions are not that important in medical science.

We all know what is a drug. And there are border cases where our ideas of drug and food overlap. It is only a small issue for regulators to decide what regulations to apply. But for doctors it is not a problem.

Saline infusion technically is not an active drug either. And yet it can be regulated as one because obviously quality standards are important for infusions.

I use cheap airlines and they are bargain in most cases.

Sometimes you get a problem, extra luggage fees, unplanned check-in at the airport etc. so that you are forced to pay much more. But counting all together they are still cheaper and more affordable.

People complain when they have to pay but forget to mention those times they paid much less.

Or maybe those people have higher needs, more luggage, less experienced with online bookings etc. Well, they are not happy that they have to pay more but for those who travel light, book, check in online and go, can still benefit. Why should we force them to pay more by forcing airlines to provide services that they don't really need?