apr

Nonsense. This debunking will be debunked in due time once the party line shifts and the narrative will need to be updated. I am old enough to have witnessed these wild gyrations in real time.

According to you no links that deviate from the narrative carry any weight, but they were very on point, providing a bit of historical perspective and suggesting that ignoring these sensational headlines and cries about imminent death would be quite prudent. Greta had to remove her twit recently warning that humanity would die by 2023, quietly memory holing the message that used to be plastered all over the media. Irrelevant? How dare you!

Recent? This scare mongering is perennial.

""" UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. """

https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

""" The following year that notable news magazine, Newsweek, April 28, 1975, under its Science section in the back, talks about the cooling world. There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may be bringing a drastic decline in food production throughout the world. """

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-2009-12-15/html/CRE...

That's a broad and unsubstantiated statement about coffee. Personally I love bitter coffee.

The article that I linked shows why even 100% vaccinated population will not achieve herd immunity. This is the meat of the article really, read it.

There is a substitution of terms in the first statement that you quoted. To stop transmission you need 90-95% of the population being _immune_ to the disease, not vaccinated against it. Do you see the difference?

The second quote by Funk got it right. But again please read the article why this is unattainable even with the 100% vaccination rate.

Don't you see certain hypocrisy in this? Aren't we told that vaccines are safe?

The whole reason that the liability shield exists was a reaction to the DTP vaccine debacle. Which was eventually taken off the market in many countries including the US.

She is a trained immunologist, but besides, her article is well reasoned and provides references for every fact she cites. Compare that to the PBS article in the root comment.

Attaching a moniker "quack" at will is no way to have a discussion.

https://investors.merck.com/news/press-release-details/2019/...

$6.2B income in 2018.

This is some shady definition. There were outbreaks in 1999, so really what does "eliminated" mean? To me it has never been "eliminated".

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4925a1.htm

Say what? The global vaccine market was over 30 Billion dollars in 2018. This is the most lucrative pharma market because you are medicating the whole population including healthy people, no other medication can top that.

Not only that, but in the US the pharmaceuticals are shielded from liability for vaccines in stark contrast to any other medication type. How's that not a profit center?

Herd immunity science is shaky to say the least:

http://www.tetyanaobukhanych.com/herd_immunity.html

To crudely rifle a barrel you just need a press. Or you can make a machine like this: https://www.alloutdoor.com/2017/04/17/watch-homemade-barrel-.... I once saw a video of a machine which did not require any machine tools, you'd just make a guide and then manually cut the riflings. All you need there is a lot of patience.

For these designs you also do not need 3d printing at all. You just need suitable pipes, or sheets of metal that you bend and either weld or use fasteners to make the receiver. You are right though, designing and building reliable magazines is probably going to be one of the things that require a lot of attention to details.

There are books that have full blueprints for crude SMGs, here is an example: https://www.amazon.com/Do-yourself-Submachine-Gun-Lightweigh...

You can rifle a barrel in your garage. Search youtube, there are DIY videos.

Btw, you need a rifled barrel to make accurate shots at long-ish distances. For close quarter combat a submachine gun with a smooth bore would do quite well. Something similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borz. Any machine shop can crank those out in numbers.

Ah, but "personally" is the operative word here, other people obviously disagree.

The "market participants" would only be those mining crypto, though.

Not only them. All people who would use bitcoin in some capacity and benefit from it, they all would be participants in that market. Miners could not exists without them, in the end of the day they get their pay from packing transactions into blocks, no transactions - no pay.

How would you value mining? What's the figure you'd assign to it? As the activity it is certainly valuable to ensure the validity of the blockchain. In my mind that's the function of the market to assign value. Of course with the technology being so new we can expect fluctuations, but I think eventually it'll settle down to some stable level that is acceptable to all market participants.

And that is totally allright. Question it all you want, that's what the market is for.

You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture.

And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change.

By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.

Why? Doing anything of value requires expending of energy and producing heat, this is unavoidable. Saying that this activity is pointless just because you are not seeing any value does not mean that it is actually pointless. In general anything that people are willing to pay money for is not pointless for someone, otherwise that money would be spent on something else. It is like saying why a farmer needs to drive that big tractor down the field using precious (for whom?) oil and polluting the air whereas I can do things manually on my pea patch just fine. If anything we should welcome higher and higher energy use because it means higher standard of living for the humankind. And just to address 'waste' here, energy is not free so 'waste' that actually wastes resources cannot go on for long lest the waster goes bankrupt.

You are contradicting yourself. More interaction leads to more noise and now you are advising people to put headphones on or leave the place entirely. How are you supposed to culturally gel and socialize under such conditions?

The magic number for the benefits cut-off is 20 hours/week.

Why it cannot be both? I agree that me bringing in the argument that the number of "worst case" cases is low compared to the number of people that contract the virus was outside the topic of the discussion. I just obliquely wanted to address the issue that polio is often brought up as an absolutely devastating and dangerous disease, and yet generally speaking it is not so.

Here is a curious link to an article from 1961 with memories still fresh from the polio outbreaks of the middle of the 20th century and shortly after the polio vaccines were introduced.

Note the reserved tone which is so at odds with the current day thinking about the success of the polio vaccine. The whole article is worth a read, I will just provide a quote here that is pertinent to our discussion.

"Evaluating the true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine and the new oral vaccines has been difficult for several reasons. Polio is a relatovely rare disease in the United States. Because so few persons get it in its paralyzing form, success of an immunizing agent is hard to determine. The definition of polio also has changed in the last six or seven years. Several diseases which were often diagnosed as polio are now classified as aseptic meningitis or illnesses caused by one of the Coxsackie or Echo viruses. The number of polio cases in 1961 cannot accurately be compared with those in, say 1952, because the criteria for diagnoses have changed."

http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1961/03/05/page/62/articl...

The history of eradicating polio was clouded by redefinition of what was considered a polio case not once but twice. Early in the day any case of acute flaccid myelitis was considered polio. You have to realize that poliovirus is just one of a few dozen of enteroviruses that can cause similar effects.

Here is a recent case that could have been labeled polio just a few decades ago: http://abc7chicago.com/health/6-year-old-boys-death-linked-t...

I cannot find stats right now but I saw numbers of AFM in India where true polio cases keep going down YoY but the overall numbers of AFM have recently skyrocketed.

Also let's keep things in perspective. The absolute number of people getting infected by polio or other enteroviruses do not actually show any symptoms. It is quite rare for the virus to invade the nervous system which leads to the symptoms we all fear.

Saying that the mechanisms are known is a major case of hubris. For example, it is still not known exactly how aluminum salts, used as adjuvants in vaccines, work. Many vaccines were developed empirically, and researchers struggle to replicate the success for other diseases. If the mechanisms, as you say, were fully known, we would already have conquered cancer.

Here is an interesting example. In the 60s a vaccine against chlamydia was developed and then tested in one of "developing" countries. Vaccinated people showed high titers of antibodies in their blood (this is, by the way, how efficacy of vaccines is judged, not by the actual clinical studies, read the inserts, you'd be surprised). Despite the high titers vaccinated people were much more likely to get the disease and the course of the disease was more severe. The vaccine was pulled, and the reason for the failure was not known at the time.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews-science/why-1960s-ch...

If you follow the links in that article you will see how the process of how the body deals with a vaccine is not necessarily the same as the process of dealing with the disease directly.

Human immune system is complicated and is not fully understood. Infant immune system differs from the one of the adults, which further complicates the matters. Saying that the science there is settled is just not true.

Polio is transmitted fecal to mouth, so proper hygiene is absolutely going to prevent you from getting polio.

As for the effectiveness, it is absolutely must be questioned, and here is a case in point: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lawrence-solomon/merck-whistleb...

Now, once the lawsuit is filed, he gets to do discovery. And if some exec at Yahoo has ever said something over email to the effect of aggressively promoting women, and, given the current set of beliefs in the Valley, it is hard to believe nothing would turn up, the guy might have struck gold here.

It is unlikely that Ferrer was her pimp as it is usually understood. It looks like that the state wants to charge him as a pimp because he provided a venue for sex workers to advertise and therefore was effectively doing promotion. It is unclear at this point whether the court will agree with that interpretation or not. I am sure the 15 yo was brought into the charging documents as a sob story for the public (and later the jury) and to pressure the accused to make some sort of a plea deal.

But that's the thing, you cannot ignore those parts in topology. Even if they look small compared to the rest of the body.

Where would you place the nostrils?

Who will pay the bills in the meantime?

The combination you described is essentially Excedrin, which contains acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Works miracles for me.

In the big scheme of things all that money are not "sitting there doing nothing". They are probably invested in some short term bonds and therefore they make some other capital expenditures possible somewhere in the overall economy.